Driving and talking ... a bad call
- |
Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community.
We all know driving is a complicated business, but that doesn't keep us from doing a lot of other things behind the wheel.
So when we siphon off some brainpower to talk on our cell phones, how much does it really matter? A lot, say Boston researchers. As in, reducing emergency stopping distance by more than a car length if you are driving 60 miles an hour.
People tracking multiple objects on a screen - a simulation analogous to the visual, physical, and cognitive demands of driving - took a little longer to react when they were just listening to someone talk, researchers reported. But listening and talking on a cell phone added significantly to their reaction times.
"If we assume that this result would generalize to driving, talking on a mobile phone would lead a driver going 60 miles per hour to travel an additional 18.5 feet (more than the length of an average car) before braking," Todd Horowitz and Michael Cohen of the Brigham and Women's Hospital and coauthors write in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
Don't think your hands-free phone gets you off the hook. The researchers say putting conversation on a speaker phone made little difference.
The medical emergency teams are intended to reduce the number of patients outside intensive care units who stop breathing or whose hearts stop beating. A crew of ICU staffers look for signs of imminent cardiopulmonary arrest and take measures to stop it.
The influential Institute for Healthcare Improvement of Cambridge has championed rapid response teams, making their implementation one of six recommendations in its campaigns to reduce preventable in-hospital deaths. More than 2,800 hospitals have signed on to introduce the teams.
IHI is standing by its policy.
In the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers tracked patients admitted to a 404-bed hospital in Kansas City, Mo., for three years, both before and after a rapid response team was established. Neither cardiopulmonary arrests nor deaths went down throughout the hospital in 20 months after the rapid response teams were activated.
"We believe that this study . . . raises critical questions about whether recommendations to disseminate rapid response teams nationally are warranted without a demonstrable mortality benefit," the authors wrote.
ELIZABETH COONEY
