The nursing shortage eases

The nursing shortage in Massachusetts has eased -- with the vacancy rate dropping from 8.5 percent in January 2003 to 6.8 percent in January of this year, according to a study released last week by the state hospital association and the Massachusetts Organization of Nurse Executives. But hospital officials and nurses cautioned that the long crisis in the nursing profession is far from over.

Hospital association president Ron Hollander attributed the vacancy drop to aggressive recruiting by hospitals. But he said that many hospitals want to increase the number of nursing positions at a time when the workforce is aging, promising a wave of retirements ahead. "Hospitals alone cannot solve a structural nursing shortage," he said.

Nursing union officials said they also were unimpressed by the reduced number of vacant nursing positions, arguing that too many hospitals are willing to get by with an undersized, overworked nursing staff.

"Front-line nurses put little stock in hospital reporting of vacancy rates, as they don't reflect what is really happening on the front lines," said Julie Pinkham, executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. "A hospital can have no vacancies, yet assign each of their nurses six, seven or eight patients."

SCOTT ALLEN

NIH award allows

creative thinkingThe National Institutes of Health has announced the winners of a prestigious new award, and three of the nine winners work in Massachusetts.

The NIH is sometimes criticized for being overly conservative in what research it funds, and the newly established Director's Pioneer Award is designed to encourage talented scientists to do high-risk, high-payoff research that might lead to new ways of treating patients.

One winner, Dr. George Q. Daley of Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, is a leading stem cell scientist and specialist in the development of blood and blood diseases. Daley plans to use the support to study cellular reprogramming, a poorly understood process in which cells change their identity.

"It represents an incredibly exciting opportunity to think outside the box," Daley said. "That is what makes science so much fun."

The other local winners are Laurence F. Abbott, a professor at Brandeis University who studies neurons and how groups of neurons process information, and Xiaoliang Sunney Xie, a professor at Harvard University who creates images of cells and the molecules involved in biological processes.

Each winner is given a total of $500,000 over five years, freeing them, somewhat at least, from the grind of applying for money.

GARETH COOK

Anyone want to read MRIs in India?

It seemed like such a good idea: Massachusetts General Hospital would set up an image-reading center in India, staffed by radiologists from Boston, to analyze the backlog of MRIs, CT scans and other images that pile up at the hospital during the day. Because of the 12-hour time difference, the radiologists in India could work a normal day shift reviewing images that would be ready for doctors in Boston when they arrived at work in the morning.

Mass. General went so far as to set up Dr. Sanjay Saini, the hospital's chief of CT scanning, in an office in Bangalore, India, last year to prove that the idea of e-mailing all these images back and forth could work. And the experiment in teleradiology did work, though hospital officials had to endure misleading accusations that they were "outsourcing" their radiology department to India.

But the plan fizzled earlier this year when the hospital couldn't get Boston-based staff to relocate to India, even temporarily. "The project came to a screeching halt when we discovered our hypothesis of people being interested in going to India for three-month rotations was incorrect," said Dr. James Thrall, Mass. General's radiologist-in-chief.

SCOTT ALLEN

Major genetics grant for the Broad Institute

The group's Cambridge headquarters isn't even finished yet, but the Broad Institute already has won a major federal grant to help researchers across the country discover the genetic vulnerabilities of diseases such as type 1 diabetes and schizophrenia. The National Institute of Health last week announced it was awarding the new institute more than $14 million over the next five years to develop computerized tools to aid researchers studying genetic variations that either lead to or help prevent disease.

Broad's National Genotyping Center will help researchers target genetic variations within huge files of genetic information on individual patients, allowing them to more rapidly -- and cheaply -- focus on potential treatments. Two decades ago, researchers paid about $10 to identify a single variation, when they might need to look at thousands of them. Officials at the Broad Institute want to lower the cost to pennies per variation.

"Human genetics is undergoing an extraordinary transformation, which is leading to the ability to take a comprehensive view of all human genetic variation and its association with disease," Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute, stated in a release.

SCOTT ALLEN