Use of PDSA Cycles to Increase Aspiration Risk and Swallow Screening Documentation in the Hospitalized General Medical Patient Care Population.

Background: Aspiration, while hospitalized, can lead to increases in length of stay and health care costs. Nurses must identify patients at risk of aspiration early to initiate appropriate precautions.

Local Problem: An increase in-hospital patient aspirations at a Midwestern hospital prompted a review of events, which identified opportunities to improve identification of patients' risk factors and completion of the bedside swallow screening.

Thin Poly(Di(Ethylene Glycol)Methyl Ether Methacrylate) Homopolymer Brushes Allow Controlled Adsorption and Desorption of PaTu 8988t Cells.

Poly(di(ethylene glycol)methyl ether methacrylate) (PDEGMA) brushes, which are known to suppress protein adsorption and prevent cell attachment, are reported here to possess interesting and tunable thermoresponsive behavior, if the brush thickness is reduced or the grafting density is altered. PDEGMA brushes with a dry ellipsometric thickness of 5 ± 1 nm can be switched from cell adherent behavior at 37 °C to cell nonadherent at 25 °C. This behavior coincides with the temperature-dependent irreversible adsorption of fibronectin from phosphate saline buffer and proteins present in the cell culture medium, as unveiled by surface plasmon resonance measurements.

Rapid Detection of Escherichia coli via Enzymatically Triggered Reactions in Self-Reporting Chitosan Hydrogels.

In this work, a self-reporting hydrogel for the rapid in situ detection of bacterial enzymes is reported. To implement the reporting function for the bacterium Escherichia coli into a film-based sensing format, chitosan hydrogel films on solid backing supports were equipped with a reporting function for the enzyme β-glucuronidase (β-GUS), which is secreted by >98% of all known E. coli strains.

Scalable Electrophysiological Investigation of iPS Cell-Derived Cardiomyocytes Obtained by a Lentiviral Purification Strategy.

Disease-specific induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be generated from patients and differentiated into functional cardiomyocytes for characterization of the disease and for drug screening. In order to obtain pure cardiomyocytes for automated electrophysiological investigation, we here report a novel non-clonal purification strategy by using lentiviral gene transfer of a puromycin resistance gene under the control of a cardiac-specific promoter. We have applied this method to our previous reported wild-type and long QT syndrome 3 (LQTS 3)-specific mouse iPS cells and obtained a pure cardiomyocyte population.