Chest
-
Review Practice Guideline
Critical Care Staffing in Pandemics and Disasters: A Consensus Report from a Sub-committee of the Task Force for Mass Critical Care- Systems Strategies to Sustain the Healthcare Workforce.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented mental health disturbances, burnout, and moral distress among health care workers, affecting their ability to care for themselves and their patients. ⋯ The Workforce Sustainment subcommittee of the TFMCC offers evidence-informed operational strategies to assist health care workers and hospitals plan, prevent, and treat the factors affecting health care worker mental health, burnout, and moral distress to improve resilience and retention following the COVID-19 pandemic.
-
There is expansive literature documenting the presence of health disparities, but there are disproportionately few studies describing interventions to reduce disparity. In this narrative review, we categorize interventions to reduce health disparity in pulmonary disease within the US health care system to support future initiatives to reduce disparity. We identified 211 articles describing interventions to reduce disparity in pulmonary disease related to race, income, or sex. ⋯ We identified the following five main themes: (1) there were few interventional trials compared with the breadth of studies describing health disparities, and trials involving patients with asthma who were Black, low income, and living in an urban setting were overrepresented; (2) race or socioeconomic status was not an effective marker of individual pharmacologic treatment response; (3) telehealth enabled scaling of care, but more work is needed to understand how to leverage telehealth to improve outcomes in marginalized communities; (4) future interventions must explicitly target societal drivers of disparity, rather than focusing on individual behavior alone; and (5) individual interventions will only be maximally effective when specifically tailored to local needs. Much work has been done to catalog health disparities in pulmonary disease. Notable gaps in the identified literature include few interventional trials, the need for research in diseases outside of asthma, the need for high quality effectiveness trials, and an understanding of how to implement proven interventions balancing fidelity to the original protocol and the need to adapt to local barriers to care.
-
Multicenter Study
Health Expectations and Quality of Life after Acute Respiratory Failure: A multicenter prospective cohort study.
Patients often have high expectations for recovery after critical illness, but the impact of these expectations on subsequent quality of life (QoL) after serious illnesses has not been evaluated empirically. ⋯ Fulfillment of health expectations is associated with better QoL after ARF, suggesting a mechanism underpinning successful ICU recovery programs that incorporate normalization and expectation management.
-
Portopulmonary hypertension (POPH) affects 5% to 6% of patients with advanced liver disease and accounts for 5% to 15% of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) cases. Compared with idiopathic PAH, POPH is associated with significantly worse survival. Recent studies have improved our understanding of the role of both PAH therapy and liver transplantation (LT) in the management of POPH and their impact on overall prognosis. ⋯ LT can result in improvement or resolution of POPH in one-half of patients and has been associated with improved survival in highly selected patients. In summary, the prognosis in POPH is poor and is impacted by the severity of both pulmonary hypertension and liver disease. Management with a combination of PAH therapy and LT in selected patients has been associated with improved pulmonary hemodynamics and survival.