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OUCH! SUNBURN!by Donna J. Shepherd A Wings of Faith Children's Book Author: Donna J. Shepherd Illustrations: Kevin Scott Collier ISBN: 1-933090-60-X ISBN 13: 9781933090603 Scroll down to see a video! From the Publisher: Donna J. Shepherd’s snappy rhymes along with the 15 colorful and fun illustrations by Kevin Scott Collier help children see the need to protect their skin in

4 Stars My "What if?" Book Tonya and Chad Walker Troy Palmer-Hughes CreateSpace No. Pages: 32 Ages: 4+ ......................... .......................... From the Forward:  Child safety experts and non-profit groups dedicated to the prevention of child abduction encourage parents to take a proactive approach in protecting their children against the threat of abduction. One of the [...]

Is this what they call the dog days? Not for me! This is my first summer living in Boston instead of Tucson, and I’m soaking up the beautiful high-80s temps they call “hot” around here and spending as much time outside as possible. But I did manage to go inside and find a few interesting tidbits for your personal interest and professional usefulness.

• Have you ever tried to explain to someone why their offhand comment that “that’s gay” offends you? Or been annoyed when you offer to help carry something heavy and you’re refused because you’re female? Maybe someone made a rude joke about Middle Easterners not knowing you are of Saudi descent? These are called “microaggressions,” and the Microaggressions Project, a collective blog made up of submissions from anyone who wants to share an experience of feeling belittled, ignored, or just frustrated, whether because of their religious beliefs, gender identity, race, victim status, or a variety of other factors. Without resorting to hate speech or angry tirades (and no specific names, locations, or other identifying information is in any of the submissions), this blog would not only be a great resource for teens who feel like their voices aren’t being heard, but you could talk with your advisory group and possibly start your own project, with something as easy as index cards and a locked jar or box.
• Do you do any prevention programs in your library regarding tobacco, alcohol, or substance abuse? Not that you aren’t doing a good job, but you might want to think about asking teens themselves to develop an engaging, innovative program. In a paper published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers found that teenagers were most receptive to anti-smoking ads when they were delivered by peers, not adults, and they were more interested in those ads that stressed the lifelong effects of smoking, particularly the negative ones like money spent on packs per week. Maybe sometimes negativity isn’t such a bad thing.
  Latimer, A.E., et al. (2012). Targeted smoking cessation messages for adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health, 50(1): 47-53.
• I hope it isn’t wishful thinking when I propose this next topic for your thousands of patrons who will be coming in in the next few weeks before heading off to college, maybe to return one last pile of books and DVDs or just to say goodbye and thanks to you, their ally. Make sure your collegebound patrons (as well as those who will be entering the workforce or alternative programs) know that reading doesn’t stop after high school. While the publishing industry makes up its mind on whether or not New Adult is a viable new category, plenty of bloggers are gathering resources for writers and readers who want to graduate from YA but not jump straight into books about 40something divorce(e)s. And the Book Report Network, a set of linked book review sites, recently launched 20Something Reads, a special branch dedicated to that same group. Slowly but surely, books are trickling out that deal with post-high school confusion to post-college drama.
• Weeding a bunch of old magazines? Before tossing them in the recycling bin, check out Ben Heine’s Pencil Vs. Camera Project. First, be wowed. Look up and count how many hours you’ve been at your computer. Then consider tearing out interesting pictures from magazines, printing out or Pinning some of your favorites of Heine’s, and encouraging your patrons to do the same. As someone whose stance on fine art is to enjoy but never partake, I recall a similar assignment in fifth grade art class, and I’m so proud of my drawing of deer that I still have it, more than a decade later. There’s somethin
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By Anayo Akunne

Delirium is a common but serious condition that affects many older people admitted to hospital. It is characterised by disturbed consciousness and changes in cognitive function or perception that develop over a short period of time. This condition is sometimes called “acute confusional state.”

It is associated with poor outcomes. People with delirium have higher chances of developing new dementia, new admission to institutions, extended stays in the hospital, as well as higher risk of death. Delirium also increases the chances of hospital-acquired complications such as falls and pressure ulcers. Poor outcomes resulting from delirium will reduce the patient’s health-related quality of life but also increase the cost of health care.

Delirium can be prevented if dealt with urgently. Enhanced care systems based on multi-component prevention interventions are associated with the potential to prevent new cases of delirium in hospitals. Prevention in a hospital or long-term care setting will lead to the avoidance of costs resulting from patients’ care. For example, the cost of caring for a patient with severe long-term cognitive impairment is high, and prevention of delirium could reduce the number of patients with such impairment. It will therefore reduce the cost of caring for such patients. Prevention could reduce lost life years and loss in health-related quality of life due to other adverse health outcomes associated with delirium.

The multi-component prevention interventions involve making an assessment of people at risk in order to identify and then modify risk factors associated with delirium. Delirium risk factors targeted in such interventions normally include cognitive impairment, sleep deprivation, immobility, visual and hearing impairments, and dehydration. The people at risk of delirium have their risk of delirium reduced through such interventions. The implementation of these interventions is usually done by a trained multi-disciplinary team of health-care staff. This means additional implementation cost. It would therefore be useful to know if this set of prevention interventions would be cost-effective. It was indeed found to be convincingly cost-effective by the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and was recommended for use in medically ill people admitted to hospital.

It is cost-effective to target multi-component prevention interventions at elderly people at both intermediate and high risk for delirium. It is an attractive intervention to health-care systems. In the United Kingdom the savings for the intervention would spread unevenly between the National Health Service (NHS) and social care providers. The savings to the NHS may be modest and largely accrue through lower costs resulting from reduced hospital stay, whereas the savings to social care are likely to be more considerable resulting from an enduring and diminished burden of dependency and dementia, particularly reduced need for expensive care in long-term care settings. The NHS acute providers may need to invest to implement the intervention and to accrue savings to the wider public sector. The current NHS hospital funding system does not incentivise this type of investment, and this could be a major structural barrier to a widespread uptake of delirium prevention systems of care in the UK.

In the work undertaken as part of the NICE guideline on delirium, the additional cost of implementing the intervention was based on the description of the intervention that required additional staff for delivery. It is possible that the guideline provides an important under-estimate of cost-effectiveness. This is because it might be possible to implement the intervention within existing resources. The intervention is designed to address risk factors for delirium by delivering the sort of person-centred routine c

Eugene H. Rubin, MD, PhD is Professor and Vice-Chair for Education in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis – School of Medicine.  Charles F. Zorumski MD is the Samuel B. Guze Professor and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis – School of Medicine, where he is also Professor of Neurobiology.  In addition, he is Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Director of the Washington University McDonnell Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology. Together they wrote, Demystifying Psychiatry: A Resource for Patients and Families, which offers a straightforward description of the specialty and the work of its practitioners.  In the excerpt below we learn about the prevalence of psychiatric disorders.  In the original article below they argue for funds to support drug prevention rather than for research for the resulting medical problems.

Heart disease, cancer, and stroke are the leading causes of death in the US. This is well known. What is less well known is that cigarette smoking (nicotine dependence) is the most important preventable contributor to these causes of death and alcohol abuse is the third most important contributor. These two legal substances have substantial addiction potential and together account for more than 400,000 deaths per year in the US. Once a young person smokes more than about 100 cigarettes, his or her chances of becoming addicted are substantial. Long term risky drinking predisposes a person to many health consequences in addition to enhancing the risk of becoming alcohol dependent. Risky alcohol use is defined as drinking 5 or more alcoholic beverages (12 oz beer equivalents) over a few hours on repeated occasions (actually, it is 5 drinks for men and 4 for women).

When misused, alcohol can lead to job loss, destruction of relationships, and a myriad of physical ailments not to mention its contribution to increased rates of traffic accidents, violence, and suicides. Alcohol-related disorders are major reasons why our emergency rooms (ERs) are so busy.

Cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin are illegal drugs that with repeated use can take over a person’s ability to behave rationally. These addictive drugs have severe physical and psychiatric consequences. They destroy relationships as well and harm society in obvious ways. They also increase our health care costs and tie up our ERs.

All of these drugs, including nicotine and alcohol, hijack the brain’s motivational system and hamper its executive system (the part of the brain that helps us think, plan, and learn). Each drug interacts with the “wiring” of these brain systems in different, but related, ways. The cigarette smoker who reaches for a smoke before getting out of bed in the morning, the alcoholic who needs an eye-opener to start the day, and the woman who prostitutes herself in order to get her next injection of heroin – all are responding to the control of an abused substance.