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from the nurses--for-more-than-great-halloween-costumes dept.
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/21/nurses-create-in-a-medical-makerspace/
University of Texas Medical Branch and an MIT initiative have joined forces to create the first maker space in a hospital. Often nurses see things that would make their jobs easier or a patient's care better and now they can create custom solutions to those problems. They aim to spread this to other hospitals and form a community of medical makers.
Although there are many skilled and dedicated types of health care professionals, nurses are often the main point of contact between the medical establishment and a patient. You will probably spend more time with your nurse–especially in a hospital setting–than any other health care provider. Every patient's needs are different, so it isn't surprising that nurses sometimes improvise unique solutions to help their patients be more comfortable or recover faster.
That's the idea guiding an innovative program called MakerNurse–an initiative backed by MIT and the Robert W. Johnson Foundation. The idea is to encourage nurses to be makers. One of the project's cofounders, Anna Young, had found nurses in Central America making do with what they had on hand and naturally acting as makers. "We saw a nurse repair a stethoscope diaphragm with an overhead transparency," she said. Young noted that often nurses didn't realize the significance of their making–it was just how they got through the day.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @03:35AM
What nurses can use, and use right away, are simple mechanical gizmos to help the patient sit up, move, take med, eat, etc. You see the things that nurses do for variety of patients, then you know this is no brainer. Physically, nursing is almost a blue-collar profession.
Fancy-schamtzy synthetic bio nano magic can wait.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday October 28 2015, @10:55AM
then you know this is no brainer
I thought we were supposed to say "persistent vegatitive state" these days.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 28 2015, @05:58PM
Physically, nursing is almost a blue-collar profession.
Agreed, and it's getting worse in the US due to the increasing national weight average.
Back injuries on the rise, for example. [npr.org]