Heavy construction about to shake the Critical Care Wing Walls - permanent and otherwise - are coming down and going up as heavy construction to link the CCW to the new inpatient tower begins next week. Clinicians, contractors and staff have been meeting to hold down the noise, vibration and disruption for patients. >>More 

North of campus, the Science + Tech Park gets some new energy The dreamed-of bubbling scientific lab and commercial hothouse for faculty members still has just one building on it. A new director and a bigger board look "to get this thing going. And I mean literally tomorrow morning." >>More

FDA clears promising therapy for advanced prostate cancer patients 

After a phase III trial at UCH, described in a New England Journal of Medicine article last month by the Cancer Center's Thomas Flaig, MD (left), patients across the U.S. can now use a promising new hormone therapy. >>More 

UCH builds a novel Heart Valve Clinic No one can live well - much less long - with leaky, narrowed or diseased heart valves. And none of the growing number of ways to treat them works for everyone. A new, collaborative way for patients, families and referring physicians to choose the right one has begun at the Cardiac & Vascular Center. Sidebar. The wait - and race - to use a "game changer." >>More
 

A research center turns entrepreneurial The new Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Biology, with its dozens of physicians and scientists, has "significant" momentum. But with fewer hard-to-get NIH grants available, it hopes to start generating revenue. It has turned to a keen businessman (Don Elliman, foreground, with the center's founding director, Dennis Roop, PhD) to help lead the way. >>More 

"It's not just clinical"  Third-year med students - trained largely to treat or halt disease - are now getting a taste of the complex care for patients who need to cope with disease as well as psycho-social and spiritual issues. Right: UCH social worker Meagan Beard, LSW, serves as a preceptor to students for "Palliative Day." >>More
 

The air they breathe In a complex health care system where it often takes a multidisciplinary village to make things work, an important part of the machinery that creates safe patient discharge sometimes falls to the hospital's lone respiratory case manager, Linda Gunnison (left). >>More 

But out of breath This Hospital Life: Linda Gunnison jokingly calls her frenetic job evaluating oxygen needs and arranging respiratory therapy for patients her "weight management program." Our reporter, for one, needed oxygen after following her around for a few hours. Plus: "What You Read" and a skin cancer clarification.  >>More

An oasis in seniors' "desert of cognitive and social interaction" 

A structured effort to restore elderly patients' sense of purpose and combat delirium and loneliness by stirring up enjoyable memories won top honors for innovative care at a national conference in Dallas last month. Now Harvard and Cogent have come calling. Plus: a volunteer brings light to patients' lives. Left: some of the staff and volunteers who made the "purposeful visit" program possible. >>More 

"One hospital speaks adult, the other pediatric" The first executive director of UCH's and Children's new jointly operated service for women delivering certain at-risk fetuses arrived to find a lot of the work of marrying two talented multidisciplinary staffs well underway. Mary Beth Martin (right) hopes to schedule the new Colorado Institute of Maternal & Fetal Health's first delivery by late summer. >>More
 

 Around UCH Our regular round-up of goings-on, big and small, in and around the hospital. This issue: a spring in the step from the RN Survey (right); a blood drive for steak and pie; going undercover to fight colorectal cancer; Bike to Work Day rolls around; more.

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Dean Krugman's news The latest about what's going on at the School of Medicine. >>More