Great Falls Clinic

Nurses play an important role in pandemic and disaster response, often at a personal cost to their overall well-being. Interviews with 19 frontline COVID-19 nurses helped illuminate priority focus areas involving nurses in the planning process, providing clear communication and offering mental health services. These recommendations align with and reinforce conclusions and recommendations from The Future of Nursing 2020-2030 Report.

This department provides a space for current and past PK–12 teachers of mathematics to connect with other teachers of mathematics through their stories that lend personal and professional support.

Preparation of nursing students has traditionally occurred in academic settings where faculty develop programs of study. Practice settings often find themselves investing in significant education and support as the new-graduate nurse transitions into the RN role. A gap in preparation exists between academic and practice expectations for the generalist RN role. Collaboration among academic and practice partners in the development of a core clinical curriculum, along with supporting content and learning activities, provides enriched clinical experiences that enhance readiness for the practicing role. The Culture of Caring (COC) Model guides academic and practice partners as a teaching-learning framework for the preparation of nursing students. The COC clinical curriculum bundles together supporting resources that include a handbook, workbook, faculty pocket guide, calendar, and nursing student cards used to foster the clinical experience.

Distributed cell division counting (DCDC), an analytic tool developed using synthetic biology, enables researchers to tag cells of Escherichia coli, follow their passage through the gastrointestinal (GI) tract of a mouse—or, presumably, a human—as they divide, and determine bacterial cell population dynamics within this otherwise inaccessible anatomic system, according to Cameron Myhrvold, Pamela Silver, and their collaborators at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. This analytic approach can be adapted to “study microbial growth during infection, gut dysbiosis, antibiotic therapy, or other situations relevant to human health,” they note. Details appeared 30 November 2015 in Nature Communications (doi:10.1038/ncomms10039).

Following a synthetic biology approach and by swapping genes encoding the bacteriophage tail, it now is feasible to retarget and thus deliver phages to virtually any designated bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant pathogens, according to Timothy Lu and his collaborators at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass. These customized phages attack targeted bacteria even in mixed cultures, they report. Details appeared 23 September 2015 in Cell Systems (doi:10.1016/j.cels.2015.08.013).

Recently uncovered microbes that live beneath and along the sea floor consume methane and sulfate ions, while generating bicarbonate that they use to build limestone rocks and then entomb themselves in those pores and crevices, according to geobiologists Victoria Orphan and Jeffrey Marlow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and their collaborators. They propose calling the members of these microbial consortiums “autoendoliths” to distinguish them from other rock-dwelling microbes, called endoliths, that either degrade rock or passively abide in rocky cavities. Details appeared in the July 2015 Geobiology (doi:10.1111/gbi.12131).

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, more commonly known as baker's yeast, is being developed as a means for producing opioid-based drugs, with the long-term goal of making those drugs from glucose instead of extracting them from poppy plants, according to Christina Smolke at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., and her collaborators. They recently reported progress toward that goal after inserting genes from the poppy plant, Papaver somniferum, as well as other genes from Pseudomonas putida M10, which grows on poppy straw waste, into yeast cells—enabling them to produce opioids from intermediates that poppy plants make relatively early in that metabolic pathway and to do so with improved efficiency. Details appear October 2014 in Nature Chemical Biology (doi:10.1038/nchembio.1613).

In the early 1990s, much of the periodontal profession perceived an upcoming shift in services performed by periodontists as many patients began to expect sedation for periodontal surgery. As a result, in 1993 the American Academy of Periodontology began encouraging postgraduate periodontal programs to train residents in the use of conscious sedation. The purpose of this study is to investigate trends in the training of intravenous (i.v.) sedation in residency and its use in periodontal practice. An 18-question survey was mailed to a sample of 1596 active periodontists throughout the United States and Canada. Thirty-seven percent (596) of the surveys were returned. Twenty-two retired periodontists responded and were excluded from the analysis. The data from the remaining 574 surveys were analyzed with a statistical software package. Approximately half (49.8%) of the survey respondents offer i.v. sedation in their practices. Among respondents who completed residency prior to 1996, 42.6% offer i.v. sedation compared with 64.2% of respondents who completed residency in 1996 or later. The number of i.v. sedations performed in residency was moderately correlated with the number of i.v. sedations personally performed in periodontal practice (Spearman r = 0.5169, P <0.0001). The largest percentage of periodontists using i.v. sedation (74.0%) was reported from American Academy of Periodontology District 5 (south central United States), whereas District 7 (New Jersey and New York) reported the lowest usage (15.6%). Approximately half of all periodontists provide i.v. sedation, with more recent periodontal graduates more likely to personally offer and administer i.v. sedation services for their patients. Regional differences exist in the use and training of i.v. sedation.