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Survivors of intimate partner violence find safety, hope and purpose

August 9, 2010

Nadine Kaslow, PhD

Nadine Kaslow, PhD, Emory psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory, has learned a lot about Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) over the last two decades. In the 1990’s, Kaslow began the development of a program that was eventually named the “Nia Project.”

Nia is a counseling program for abused and suicidal African American women, funded by grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute of Mental Health. The name comes from the Kwanzaa term that means “purpose.”

Nia serves countless numbers of abused and suicidal women who come through Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital’s emergency department each year. The women come in with black eyes, broken bones, and broken spirits, often inflicted by the people who are supposed to love them the most: their husbands, boyfriends and partners.

According to the CDC, Intimate Partner violence resulted in more than 1,500 deaths in the United States in 2005.  Statistics from the Commission on Domestic Violence show that African American females experienced intimate partner violence at a rate 35 percent higher than that of white females, and about 22 times the rate of women of other races. The number one killer of African American women ages 15 to 34 is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner.


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Heart disease pioneer named ‘Georgia Woman of the Year’

July 30, 2010

Many people know that heart disease is currently the number one killer of women in the United States. But a little more than a half a century ago it was widely believed that cardiovascular disease only affected men. Renowned cardiologist, Nanette K. Wenger, MD, challenged this theory and thanks to her pioneering efforts over the last 50 years women today know better.

2010 Georgia Woman of the Year, Nanette K. Wenger, MD

Wenger, a professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at Emory University School of Medicine and former chief of cardiology at Grady Memorial Hospital, is being honored as the 2010 Georgia Woman of the Year for her lifetime commitment to reducing women’s disability and death from cardiovascular disease.

She joins the ranks of other distinguished Georgia women including First Lady Rosalynn Carter who was named the first Georgia Woman of the Year in 1996 by the Georgia Commission on Women. In addition to this prestigious accolade, Wenger has accumulated dozens of awards throughout her celebrated career including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American College of Cardiology in 2009. She is a sought after lecturer for issues related to heart disease in women, heart disease in the elderly, cardiac rehabilitation, coronary prevention and contemporary cardiac care.


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NIH director visits Emory, Atlanta Clinical & Translational Science Institute

April 21, 2010

David Stephens, MD, Jim Wagner, PhD, Earl Lewis, PhD, Francis Collins, MD, PhD

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and chief of staff Dr. Kathy Hudson, paid a daylong visit to Emory’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center, including Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and Morehouse School of Medicine on April 14.

The purpose of Collins’ visit was to view the activities of the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute, one of 46 national CTSAs funded by the NIH through the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).  Collins also will visit CTSAs at Duke, UNC, and Vanderbilt in the future.

Collins asked that his visit focus on “how CTSAs are enabling science.” It was an opportunity for the ACTSI, a partnership among Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Institute of Technology and others, including Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Georgia Research Alliance, Georgia BIO, Kaiser Permanente, CDC, the Atlanta VA Medical Center and the Grady Health System, to showcase the unique contributions the ACTSI makes to enabling clinical and translational research.


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Reflection and compassion go hand-in-hand

March 29, 2010

Kimberly Manning, MD, Lisa Bernstein, MD, and William Branch, MD, leading the way

Kimberly Manning, MD, an internist at Grady Memorial Hospital who directs Emory’s Transitional Year Residency Program, asks her residents to write about an experience – good or bad – that made a lasting impression on them.

Manning herself regularly writes about her experiences as a doctor. She calls it “habitual reflection” and believes that the practice is vital to developing good doctors. She regularly asks herself about interactions with patients and imagines herself in their place. What was the patient feeling? How would I feel in the same situation? Did the patient process everything I said?

These are the kinds of questions she wants medical students and residents to ask themselves regularly. By examining experiences that were rewarding, saddening or even frustrating, they can become better doctors, she says in the new issue of Emory Medicine magazine.


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Nia Project: Helping victims of violence

March 1, 2010

Nadine Kaslow, PhD, Emory School of Medicine professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, founded in the early 1990s the Grady Nia Project for abused and suicidal African-American women. Named for the Kwanzaa term that means “purpose,” Nia serves countless numbers of abused women who come through Grady Memorial Hospital’s emergency department each year.

The program is funded by grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Mental Health, and Kaslow serves as principal investigator. Kaslow also serves as chief psychologist at Grady Memorial Hospital and holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Psychology, Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine, and the Rollins School of Public Health.

Nadine Kaslow, PhD

Kaslow says the women in the Nia program, who either feel suicidal or have attempted suicide because of stress associated with violence, are victims of intimate partner violence and are usually black, minimally employed, with children and addicted to drugs and alcohol. Many are homeless.

Nia is staffed 24/7. Some staffers may make a trip to the emergency department in the middle of the night when a woman comes in with injuries or a story consistent with intimate partner violence or when she has attempted suicide. If a woman enrolls in the program, she will join approximately 50 to 75 other women who are going through it at any given time.


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NIH at Emory to advance women’s heart health

February 16, 2010

NIH meets at Emory to discuss women's cardiovascular health and research

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has convened a key meeting at Emory on women’s cardiovascular health and research. The meeting, co-hosted by the Office of Research on Women’s Health and Emory School of Medicine, is focused today and tomorrow on NIH planning of the women’s health research agenda for the next decade.

Vivian Pinn, MD, associate director for research on women’s health, and director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at NIH, opened the meeting with Emory’s conference chair, Nanette Wenger, MD, professor of medicine (cardiology), Emory School of Medicine, and chief of cardiology at Grady Memorial Hospital.

Nanette K. Wenger, MD

In a career that spans more than 50 years, Wenger’s dedication to reducing women’s disability and death from cardiovascular disease has made her one of the country’s most-respected experts on coronary heart disease in women. In 2009, Wenger received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American College of Cardiology.

Although Wenger has earned dozens of awards in her celebrated career, she says her greatest professional achievement has been to help change a major paradigm in cardiology: the assumption that heart disease affects only men. A half a century ago heart disease was thought of as a “man’s disease.”


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Intervention: preventing trips to the trauma unit

February 9, 2010

Jana MacLeod, MD

Drunk drivers have been known to walk away from auto wrecks—but that’s unusual. In fact, the norm is this: those who drink before an accident of any kind, particularly a motor vehicle accident, have a much higher chance of being injured or dying than if they hadn’t been drinking at all.

So, Jana MacLeod, MD, and her colleagues trained surgical interns to conduct brief interventions on patients with alcohol-related injuries. MacLeod is an associate professor of surgery, Emory University School of Medicine. She says brief interventions offer patients a way to talk about their alcohol use with their physician, and then make behavioral changes if they so choose.

MacLeod talks about the benefits of these interventions in an Emory Sound Science podcast.

“Recent studies have shown brief alcohol interventions with trauma patients who have a history of alcohol misuse successfully prevented future episodes of drunk driving,” says MacLeod. What’s more, it’s been shown a five-minute intervention reduces hazardous drinking patterns up to three years after injury and decreases recidivism.


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hkorschun 9 February 2010 General Health , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Providing complex care for individuals in need

December 8, 2009

Emory Healthcare physicians provided $48.9 million in charity care in fiscal year 2008–2009, a total that does not include uncompensated care provided by Emory physicians practicing at publicly funded Grady Memorial Hospital and other affiliate institutions.

Charity care includes two types of care. Indigent care refers to care provided to patients with no health insurance, not even Medicare or Medicaid. Catastrophic care refers to care provided to patients who have some coverage but whose medical bills are so large that paying them would be permanently life-shattering. People without ability to pay for care are not faceless statistics to Emory clinicians but patients in need of care.

In fact, Emory’s Wesley Woods Center exemplifies Emory Healthcare’s commitment to serving patients and their families who are facing issues related to aging. The majority of the 30,000 patients treated last year at Wesley Woods’ 100-bed hospital and outpatient clinic were elderly, in their 70s, 80s, 90s and older.

But Wesley Woods also is a life-saver for many younger patients who require chronic care and specialty services for which the center is known, including wound care, rehabilitation and respiratory care, such as weaning from ventilator therapy.

Patient receives care at Wesley Woods

Patient receives care at Wesley Woods

For example, patient Sherry Smith’s CT scan at Emory University Hospital showed large blood clots blocking the vessels leading to her spleen and kidneys. Over the next two weeks, she had four operations. Surgeons removed the clots and her spleen and cut out portions of her bowel that had been destroyed by lack of oxygenated blood. She required a feeding tube and a tracheotomy to help with breathing as she recovered.

Patients can move seamlessly between the two Emory Healthcare facilities for needed care. Smith moved back and forth between Emory and Wesley Woods as she improved. She also got some unexpected help in paying for her care. When she got sick, Smith lost her job. During the six months she spent moving between the two hospitals, her bill at Wesley Woods was more than $120,000, and that at Emory University Hospital, almost $130,000.

Community Benefits Report

Community Benefits Report

To her relief, Emory offered to pay her COBRA insurance fees to help her maintain her insurance for the time allowed. Payments would cover only part of the actual cost of care. Wesley Woods social workers also helped Smith apply for Medicaid to cover health care costs while she continues her recovery in a rehab facility closer to her home.

Read more about charity care at Emory in the Community Benefits Report 2009.

sgoodwin 8 December 2009 Emory Healthcare , , No Comments

Curiosity about health and a borderless world

October 23, 2009

Developing effective HIV prevention and intervention programs in the most affected communities is a challenge globally as well as locally. It’s also a challenge that Emory infectious disease specialist Carlos del Rio, MD, is addressing as newly appointed chair of the Rollins School of Public Health’s Hubert Department of Global Health.

Carlos del Rio, MD

Carlos del Rio, MD

Del Rio is uniquely equipped to address HIV prevention and intervention. As the former chief of medicine at Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta’s safety-net hospital, he witnessed firsthand patients affected by the disease. He says there ought to be incentives for people to stay healthy instead of barriers to staying healthy.

More daunting for del Rio is preventing disease on a global scale, much of which rests on changing unhealthy behaviors related to diet, exercise, smoking, and sex. He says we know very little about how to implement population-wide behavior change, and we need to learn more.

Del Rio says growing human capital to strengthen research capacity in resource-constrained countries is also key. Since 1998, the NIH/Fogarty International Center has funded the Emory AIDS Training and Research Program (AITRP) to build capacity in Armenia, the Republic of Georgia, Ethiopia, Mexico, Rwanda, Vietnam and Zambia. Led by del Rio, AITRP brings a select group of young scientists to Emory each year for advanced training. Emory faculty also train and mentor scientists in these countries.

The training program has opened avenues to improving health. In Ethiopia, del Rio helped expand HIV testing among the police force and bring antiretroviral therapy into the community for people living with HIV.

In the Republic of Georgia, the Emory AITRP and the Emory-Georgia Tuberculosis Research Training Program, another NIH/Fogarty program led by RSPH adjunct faculty member and Emory School of Medicine professor  Henry Blumberg, MD, has helped build research capacity in HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis research.

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Emory HIV/AIDS experts lends voice to reach out

September 30, 2009

The latest CDC statistics on HIV/AIDS estimate more than 1.1 million persons in the United States are living with diagnosed or undiagnosed HIV/AIDS. HIV gradually attacks the immune system and causes AIDS, the final stage of HIV infection.

It can take years for a person infected with HIV to reach this stage. Having AIDS means that the virus has weakened the immune system to the point at which the body has a difficult time fighting infection. Early HIV diagnosis is vital, so people who are infected can fully benefit from available live-saving treatments.

David Malebranche, MD

David J. Malebranche, MD

This critical message is the foundation of a new campaign titled “Treatment is Power.” David J. Malebranche, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and internist at Grady Memorial Hospital is an expert voice for the campaign by Gilead Sciences. Listen to Malebranche on a public service announcement (MP3).

Malebranche says opportunity is unique in reaching people living with HIV. It is geared toward reducing the stigma and fear associated with taking medications that slow down the virus and helps individuals realize the many quality of life improvements associated with early treatment.

As a nationally recognized speaker and advocate, the idea that “treatment is power” is not a new theme for Malebranche. Fostering a close working doctor-patient relationship is one Malebranche aggressively promotes at the Ponce Infectious Disease Center – a local AIDS clinic in downtown Atlanta, where he delivers comprehensive care to uninsured patients living with HIV/AIDS.

He says early treatment is an essential part of the fight against HIV.

From 2006-2008, Malebranche served on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, which provides recommendations to the President and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regarding national and international HIV/AIDS programs and policies. He conducts research exploring the social, structural and cultural factors influencing sexual risk-taking and HIV testing practices among black men.

jmerchant 30 September 2009 Research , , , , No Comments
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