The South Carolina Surgical Quality Collaborative: A New Effort to Improve Surgical Outcomes in South Carolina.

Regional surgical quality Collaboratives are improving surgical quality and cutting costs by building regional relationships that leverage information sharing to improve outcomes. The South Carolina Surgical Quality Collaborative (SCSQC) is a new regional surgical quality Collaborative focused on improving general surgery outcomes in South Carolina. It is a joint effort which brings together the skills and resources of Health Sciences South Carolina, the South Carolina Hospital Association, and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of SC Foundation to create a web-based data collection system to provide real-time outcomes data to participating surgeons, and establishing a supportive network for sharing best practices and promoting data driven quality improvement.

The choice: Lewellys F. Barker and the full-time plan.

In 1914, Lewellys F. Barker, William Osler's successor as Professor of Medicine and physician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, resigned to enter private practice rather than accept the terms of a full-time plan, whereby professors in clinical departments would be salaried like other professors in the university. Barker had been an early proponent of the full-time plan.

Prosthetic valve endocarditis due to vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium: treatment with chloramphenicol plus minocycline.

We report a case of prosthetic valve endocarditis and persistent bacteremia due to vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium. The combination of parenteral chloramphenicol plus minocycline therapy was administered for 8 weeks and resulted in cure after treatment with quinupristin-dalfopristin had failed.