Nation briefs 8/15/03

Anti-stress measure has Denver on edge

DENVER -- Wherever there is disharmony, there is Jeff Peckman.

Sensing his hometown was on the verge of a collective breakdown, the lanky activist quietly gathered enough signatures to put a stress reduction measure on Denver's November ballot.

If approved, it could lead to Indian music being pumped into city office buildings, "less stressful" food in school cafeterias and mass meditation focusing on peace and tranquillity.

"This is what I was meant to do," he said. "I find progressive solutions to big problems."

"It's lunacy, it's frivolous, it's fantasy," declared Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown. "If you want fantasy go to Disneyland. This guy wants to mandate that everyone in Denver 'Have a Nice Day.' That's their decision, not the government's."

And Brown isn't wild about Indian tunes filtering into his office.

"Hank Williams reduces my stress. Should I decide what everyone else listens to? Get the flakiness of this whole thing?" he said. "These are city offices. We don't sit around holding hands, burning incense and singing 'Kumbaya.' We are in serious economic times."

Rx for Poor Penmanship

LOS ANGELES -- Surgeons at Riverside, Calif., County Regional Medical Center will soon start a pilot program to deal with a cliched but common curse -- poor penmanship that at minimum causes delays and, at worst, death.

Instead of scrawling notes on patients' charts, doctors at the Riverside County hospital will use Palm Pilots to create clean, typed notes.

"This is one of these things which, when you first hear it, sounds kind of mundane," said hospital Chief Executive Douglas Bagley. "If you think about it a little more deeply . . . it's kind of a chronic problem."

A doctor's handwriting can be a life-and-death matter. In 1995, a Texas man who was supposed to receive a heart medication instead was given a blood-pressure drug with a similar name because a pharmacist misread a cardiologist's scrawl. Worse, the patient was instructed to take eight times the regular dose because of the mixup. He suffered a heart attack the next day and died within two weeks.

Health officials believe that poor handwriting is behind some of the preventable medical errors suffered by more than 1 million patients annually. Most commonly, poor penmanship creates delays for nurses, pharmacists and others who have to track down the doctor to decipher the writing.

-- From wire reports