The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) announced recently that two University publications, UMDNJ Magazine and UMDNJ Research, won prestigious awards of distinction in its national competition.
Medical and educational services for Latino families with asthmatic children have expanded, thanks to a gift of more than $500,000 from sanofi-aventis, through the Foundation of UMDNJ.
Services are offered through RESPIRA (meaning "breathe" in Spanish), a bilingual education program operated by the UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School. The program, which has served Essex and Union counties, will now reach families in Hudson, Morris and Passaic counties. It is partnering with the New Jersey Children's Health Project and the mobile medical unit recently launched by the Children's Health Fund and the UMDNJ-School of Nursing.
A collaborative research effort to develop diagnostic tools that can improve the accuracy of predicting patients' responses to treatment and related clinical outcomes was announced by IBM, The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ), UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and Rutgers University.
Through the use of advanced computer and imaging technologies that facilitate comparisons of cancerous tissues and cell and radiology studies, researchers and physicians expect to determine more accurate cancer prognoses, to plan more personalized therapy and, subsequently, to discover and develop new cancer drugs.
Children ages 12 and younger received free dental care at one of five UMDNJ sites participating in the annual Give Kids A Smile® National Dental Access Day last week. This initiative is sponsored each February by the American Dental Association to focus attention on the epidemic of untreated oral disease among disadvantaged children.
Nearly 160 students and 50 faculty members from UMDNJ-New Jersey Dental School volunteered at the school, making it the largest participating site among the 55 New Jersey locations and one of the largest single-day sites in the country. In Scotch Plains, an estimated 95 students and 19 faculty members from UMDNJ-School of Health Related Professions were available to treat children.
According to a UMDNJ study, medical practices employing nurse practitioners perform better diabetes patient monitoring compared to those with physician assistants or doctor-only practices. The study results are reported in the January/February issue of Annals of Family Medicine.
Dr. Pamela Ohman Strickland, an associate professor of biostatistics at UMDNJ-School of Public Health, and the study's lead investigator, says that several organizations, including the Institute of Medicine and the Society of General Internal Medicine, have published reports that recommend creating teams of clinicians to optimize the quality and efficiency of care.
