TouroCOM Middletown to Present at CHEST Conference
Three students will present their research at the prestigious medical conference this year.
Three Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine (TouroCOM) Middletown students will be delivering a presentation at one of the world’s most prestigious medical conferences.
Third-year students Oddie Moghalu, Shiv Patel and John Bessada will deliver a presentation, “Early Mobility in the Intensive Care Unit,” at the American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) conference this year, held this October in Los Angeles. The three students along with fellow students Satin Zarkar and Brendan Skeehan, were part of a groundbreaking research program led by Dr. Aamir Gilani, MD, MPH, a critical care pulmonologist at Orange Regional Medical Center and adjunct professor of medicine at TouroCOM-Middletown.
The research was part of a nation-wide collaborative critical care effort aimed at reducing the rate of hospital-induced delirium in the intensive care unit (ICU). While hospital-induced delirium—a temporary but severe form of mental impairment that leads to longer stays in hospitals—is not widely understood, one strategy employed to decrease its occurrence is increasing the mobility of patients in the ICU. While previous experiments had opted for different strategies, Dr. Gilani had physical therapists accompany doctors on their morning rounds to assess patients and provide them with physical therapy.
To gauge and document the effects, Dr. Gilani relied on the five Middletown students who visited and took down the data each day for four months in 2015. The results from the study were promising.
“Patients who had physical therapy while in the ICU had better mobility outcomes by the time they left,” stated Moghalu. “Patients who had physical therapy also left the ICU earlier.”
There were other benefits to patients leaving the ICU early.
“When you decrease the length of stay, you decrease the number of ICU-acquired diseases,” stated Patel.
On average, patients in the study left the ICU half-a-day earlier than patients in the control group that did not receive physical therapy. The financial aspect of saving half-a-day in the ICU could be enormous, noted Dr. Galini, who had the monetary results tabulated by John Hopkins.
The students wrote up the findings and presented them last year at the New York Society of Medicine conference. TouroCOM will be flying them out to present at the CHEST conference in October.
“I was lucky to have such a dedicated group of students,” said Dr. Gilani.
