Peter J. Pronovost[3] is an intensive care specialist physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.[4] He is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Departments of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, and Surgery, Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and is Medical Director for the Center for Innovation in Quality Patient Care.

He introduced an intensive care checklist protocol that during an 18-month period saved 1500 lives and $100 million in the State of Michigan.[5] According to Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, Pronovost's "work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade".[6]

In 2008 Time named Pronovost one of the 100 most influential people in the world;[7] that same year, Pronovost was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, otherwise known as a "genius grant".[1]

Pronovost's book Safe patients, smart hospitals: how one doctor's checklist can help us change health care from the inside out was released in February 2010.[8]

...Yet this same American medical system, leaves surgical instruments in patients, overdoses children with blood thinner medications, operates on the wrong side of the body, gives patients appropriate therapies only 50% of the time, and kills nearly a hundred thousand people per year from preventable errors. Perhaps most disturbing, a recent Commonwealth Fund Report ranked the United States healthcare system dead last among other industrialized nations in terms of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes...

Group turns tables on Chicago gun turn-in, uses money for gun camp

BY FRANK MAIN

Staff Reporter

fmain@suntimes.com
Last Modified: Jul 1, 2012 11:04AM

A Downstate pro-gun group says it turned payouts from Chicago’s firearm buyback program last weekend into a fund-raiser for a youth summer camp — a National Rifle Association shooting camp, that is.

The city collected 5,500 guns last Saturday in the annual buyback. The city gave out $100 MasterCard gift cards for each gun and $10 cards for BB guns and replicas.

Sixty of the guns and several BB guns were turned in by the Champaign-based Guns Save Life. In return, the group received $6,240 in gift cards, said John Boch, president of the group...

Most of the money will go toward buying ammunition for an NRA youth camp in Bloomington. The rest will pay for four bolt-action rifles that will be given away to campers.

Gun amnesty bit of a misfire

ANOTHER year, another gun amnesty. And yet another photo op involving an earnest police officer looking serious and concerned in front of a pile of firearms.

It looks such an important and effective exercise in community policing. Let’s get all these nasty (cue scary
music) guns off the street.

Except, if I may borrow a phrase from the English lass at work, it’s bollocks.

The amnesty and previous gun buy-back schemes are, for all practical purposes, public relations exercises. The effect on violent crime rates would be negligible because the sort of person who might hand in an old rifle at the cop shop is not exactly the type of ‘‘person of interest’’ associated with violent crime.

That sad collection of museum pieces and rusty old .22s pictured in The Courier last week, looked sinister enough but hardly constituted a menace to society. You see, criminals will always find ways to get illegal firearms or explosives or whatever, when they want to.

Gun amnesty alongside tougher SA laws

Legislation allowing for the jailing of people who illegally discharge guns has been introduced in the South Australian Parliament.

It is a response to cases including recent drive-by shootings in Adelaide.

SA Attorney-General John Rau said the bill creates a new offence of discharging a firearm without a lawful excuse.

Once the legislation passed, Mr Rau said a three-month amnesty would open for illegal weapons to be surrendered to police.

"The clear objective of this legislation is to put behind bars people who engage in any crime using firearms and to make any of these individuals who are in the habit of leaving home with guns in their vehicles or on their person to realise that if they are detected by the police they can expect to go to jail," he said...

Customs admits illegal gun import X-ray blunder

Posted May 24, 2012 14:08:16


Customs officials have revealed that their X-ray machines did not pick up more than 100 pistols that were illegally imported through a Sydney post office.

Police arrested four people in March over the Glock pistols that were allegedly posted from Germany to the Sylvania Waters Post Office.

Representatives from the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service were questioned about the case during a federal Estimates hearing in Canberra this morning.

At the time police said they had seized more than 200 handguns, but today's Estimates hearing was told about 122 pistols, triggers and magazines were sent by airmail.

Gun amnesty bit of a misfire

ANOTHER year, another gun amnesty. And yet another photo op involving an earnest police officer looking serious and concerned in front of a pile of firearms.

It looks such an important and effective exercise in community policing. Let’s get all these nasty (cue scary music) guns off the street.

Except, if I may borrow a phrase from the English lass at work, it’s bollocks.

The amnesty and previous gun buy-back schemes are, for all practical purposes, public relations exercises. The effect on violent crime rates would be negligible because the sort of person who might hand in an old rifle at the cop shop is not exactly the type of ‘‘person of interest’’ associated with violent crime.

That sad collection of museum pieces and rusty old .22s pictured in The Courier last week, looked sinister enough but hardly constituted a menace to society. You see, criminals will always find ways to get illegal firearms or explosives or whatever, when they want to.

Gun amnesty alongside tougher SA laws

Legislation allowing for the jailing of people who illegally discharge guns has been introduced in the South Australian Parliament.

It is a response to cases including recent drive-by shootings in Adelaide.

SA Attorney-General John Rau said the bill creates a new offence of discharging a firearm without a lawful excuse.

Once the legislation passed, Mr Rau said a three-month amnesty would open for illegal weapons to be surrendered to police.

"The clear objective of this legislation is to put behind bars people who engage in any crime using firearms and to make any of these individuals who are in the habit of leaving home with guns in their vehicles or on their person to realise that if they are detected by the police they can expect to go to jail," he said...

The state law of preemption also prevents municipalities from banning semi-automatic assault weapons or reducing the number of bullets in a magazine clip from the 30-bullet capacity used by the killer at Virginia Tech.

To: kevcol
The purging of voters in Florida will have to be a surgical endeavor as to not purge the votes of conservative Cubans in Miami Dade and not purge to votes of conservatives in the Florida panhandle.

17 posted on Thursday, June 07, 2012 2:54:26 PM by Uncle Slayton
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” is the book that gave birth to American environmentalism 50 years ago.

It’s the book that raised the first red flag over the unregulated use of chemical pesticides that killed birds and other creatures, poisoned water, and worked their way up the food chain to human consumption...

...And it’s the book that Carson said was inspired by a letter from Duxbury resident Olga Owens Huckins.

“Olga Owens Huckins told me of her own bitter experience of a small world made lifeless,” Carson wrote in her acknowledgments for “Silent Spring,’’ “and now brought my attention sharply back to a problem with which I had long been concerned. I then realized I must write this book.”

Indian women turn to firearms against threat of violence

Guns are increasingly popular with well-off Indian women who feel that they should be able to defend themselves against crime


When Dr Harveen Kaur Sidhu travels from her home in an upmarket neighbourhood of the north-western Indian city of Chandigarh, she always slips her lightweight .22 revolver in her bag. The gun is a new purchase – Sidhu got her licence only a year ago – but now the 33-year-old dentist won't travel without it.

"I don't have faith in the police to protect me. There are so many attacks on women these days. It's everybody's right to defend themselves. I think all women who are vulnerable should be carrying guns," Sidhu said. She is not alone. A growing number of well-off, educated Indian women are turning to firearms for protection....

...Gang rapes in the capital, New Delhi, are commonplace. One recent news magazine's investigation revealed widespread misogyny among the city's senior police officers, many of whom said the crimes were the fault of the victims.

"There are so many incidents, especially in Delhi. Women who are working or who are travelling should definitely have a gun," said Sidhu. She explained that changing lifestyles were making women more vulnerable, particularly single women working or coming home late at night. "Why should I be dependent on someone else, even my husband or the police, for my own safety? I should be independent," she said. "Imagine all the problems and mishaps which could be avoided if women could defend themselves properly. The females have to be self-armed and protected and should send out a strong message that we are not taking this anymore."