This week April 22^nd-26^th help us celebrate and increase public awareness for National Laboratory Professionals Week!  Every year, the last week of April designates this special week commemorating the more than 300,000 professional lab techs and pathologists who work, most times behind the scenes, to keep the entire health care field running smoothly.   Each day these valued healthcare professionals (in their UA scrubs) conduct vital testing and analyze these more than 10 billion US lab tests annually with the ultimate goal of saving patient’s lives!

Thank you to all of our customers who are in the Lab Professionals field, we take this week to recognize how important your work is in interpreting and relaying this critical information!  How are you celebrating your 2013 National Lab Week?

Whether you’re gearing up for that annual family summer vacation or just planning on spending the summer in your backyard, one thing remains the same—the sun!   This week is National Sun Safety Week, a week-long reminder of just how harmful (and painful for those of you who’ve ever had a bad burn!) the sun’s rays can be.  Did you know that, on average, one person dies EVERY hour from skin cancer in America?  But at the same time, skin cancer is recognized as one of the most preventable types of cancer.

So how can you protect yourself and your family while still having fun and staying active this summer? It’s easy! Just follow these tips from the Academy of Dermatology:

• Use SPF 15 (or higher) sunscreen daily, and reapply often because even waterproof sunscreen can fade during swimming, sweating, or towel drying
• Wear a hat and sunglasses to best protect your face and eyes from UV rays
• Don’t use tanning beds, opt for sunless tanners instead!
• Cloudy doesn’t mean risk-free–you can still burn just as easily

Do you have any tips of your own for sun safety?  And be sure to tell us what fun plans you have in store for this summer when you’re on vacation from work and your scrubs!

Today is the 25^th anniversary of “World No Tobacco” Day with this year’s theme being “tobacco industry interference”.  The mission is to stop the tobacco industry’s aggressive attempts to reverse anti-tobacco regulations that the WHO has put forth.  These regulations include health warnings on packages of tobacco, smoking bans in enclosed public places, and banning tobacco advertising and promotion.

Tobacco has been cited as one of top preventable causes of death, as it kills close to 6 million people each year.  In the US alone, cigarette smoking is the cause of approximately 1 in 5 deaths every year.  To put this statistic in perspective, this is more than car accidents, suicides, murders, AIDS, alcohol, and illegal drugs combined.

To learn more about how you can quit with a built-in support system of ex-smokers who successfully quit themselves, check out the American Cancer Society’s “Quit for Life” Program: https://www.quitnow.net/Program/ (they even help you calculate how much money you’ll save from kicking the habit!)

So now that National Nurses Week is upon us, let’s find out how it was started back in October of 1954!

 It was initiated by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare during President Eisenhower’s term as a tribute to Florence Nightingale’s legacy and active role in tending to injured soldiers around the clock in the Crimean War.  It became official in 1974 under President Nixon to commend those who are devoted to this admirable profession.  Florence Nightingale is considered to have laid the groundwork for the nursing profession, which is why International Nurses Day now falls on her birthday and people entering the nursing field must learn the “Nightingale Pledge”.   This year’s theme is “Advocating, Leading, Caring” to depict how multifaceted the field of nursing is, and how many “hats” nurses have to wear in a day on the job!

THANK YOU to all of our valued customers who dedicate their lives to nursing and caring for people when they need it most–we hope you enjoy your week of appreciation!  How are you and your co-workers celebrating this year?  You can treat yourself to new scrubs!  There are also national and local activities to celebrate Nurses Week this year, so check out the American Nurses Association event page to find one that works for you.

Facebook announced this morning that they are going to use the power of their expansive social network (161 million members in the US) to help out in the social struggle for organ donors.  Approximately 18 people a day (7,000 each year) in the United States die waiting for an organ transplant.  Last year, members took it upon themselves to use Facebook for the greater good, helping to find lost items in the Joplin, MO tornadoes and to locate missing loved ones in the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

Now Facebook users have the ability add their donor status, right where they already list basic details like their birthday or hometown along with when they made this decision and why.  The goal is to encourage others within your social network to register themselves as donors through a local online registry like Donate Life America or through the DMV.   Zuckerberg credits his girlfriend, who is in medical school to be a pediatrician, along with the recent loss of friend Steve Jobs who received a liver transplant back in 2009, as the two main reasons for this initiative.

Want to learn more?  Watch the ABC News interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg here.

For those of you in the medical field (hopefully rocking your UA scrubs), what do you think of this latest Facebook venture?

To celebrate Women’s History month this year, we’ve come up with a short list of groundbreaking female pioneers and noted how their efforts have had an effect on the medical field. Without some of their accomplishments and inventions, life for women in the medical field today could be very different!

Elizabeth Blackwell

1. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) –the first American woman to gain admission to and graduate from medical school (her acceptance was based on a vote by the student body who were joking in their unanimous “yes” vote, but the faculty acted to enroll her).  The practical joke was on the rest of the students however, Elizabeth graduated at the top of her class!
2. Emily Blackwell (1826-1910)-Elizabeth’s younger sister who was the co-founder of of the first American hospital for women, staffed solely by woman, The New York Infirmary for Indigent Woman and Children.  The sisters went on to open the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, where they both also served as professors.
3. Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1831-1895)-the first African American woman physician in the US.
4. Florence Nightingale-laid the foundation for professional nursing in 1860 when she established the first secular nursing school at the Saint Thomas Hospital in London.  International Nurses Day is now celebrated worldwide on her birthday.
5. Letitia Geer-a female inventor who is credited for inventing the medical syringe in 1899
6. Patricia Bath (1942- ) – the first African American female doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention (a method for removing cataract lenses using a laser device, which made the procedure more accurate).
7. Elizabeth Lee Hazen and Rachel Brown-co-developed Nystatin, patented in 1957 which is an anti-fungal antibiotic drug.  They donated the royalties from their invention ($13+ million) to the Research Corporation for the advancement of academic scientific study.

There are numerous other female medical pioneers that have not been mentioned in this article. If you’d like to honor anyone in particular, please leave a comment below!

Today is National IV Nurses Day!  This healthcare holiday was created back on January 25^th, 1980 when the U.S. House of Representatives wanted to honor nurse infusion specialists as well as the Infusion Nurses Society (which now has over 7,000 members!).   This year’s theme is “A Vital Role in Quality Healthcare”, which recognizes how crucial credentialed nurses are to a healthcare team.  Nurses specialized in infusions are essential for providing patients with the correct dosages of their medications as well as taking preventative measures against bloodstream infections that can occur at the infusion site.

Uniform Advantage would like to say Happy IV Nurses Day to all of our customers who are infusion nurses!  Since you do your part year-round to “get it right the first time” for your patients, go ahead and treat yourself to a new set of stylish spring scrubs!