Wright Memorial Hospital recognized for stroke, heart attack care

Special to the Post-Telegraph

TRENTON Wright Memorial Hospital has recently received multiple designations relating to the high level of care provided for strokes and heart attacks.

Wright Memorial earned The Joint Commission’s Acute Heart Attack Ready Certification and The Joint Commission’s Acute Stroke Ready Certification.

Wright Memorial underwent a rigorous, onsite review to earn these certifications. During the visit, reviewers from The Joint Commission evaluated compliance with related certification standards. The Joint Commission standards are developed in consultation with health care experts and providers, measurement experts, and patients. The reviewers also conducted onsite observations and interviews.

Additionally, for efforts to optimize stroke care and eliminate rural health care outcome disparities, Wright Memorial Hospital has received the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines® - Stroke Rural Recognition Bronze award.

The award recognizes hospitals for their efforts toward acute stroke care excellence demonstrated by composite score compliance to guideline-directed care for intravenous thrombolytic therapy, timely hospital inter-facility transfer, dysphagia screening, symptom timeline and deficit assessment documentation, emergency medical services communication, brain imaging, and stroke expert consultation.

Also, with the recent certifications from The Joint Commission, Wright Memorial was designated by the state of Missouri as a Level III Stroke Center and a Level III STEMI Center.

The Time Critical Diagnosis (TCD) system, which implements the stroke and STEMI levels of hospital designation across the state, was created in 2013 through the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. It’s a statewide emergency medical care response system aimed at providing faster response and quality care when a time-critical emergency happens. The goal is to create consistent, statewide rules and regulations to help emergency and hospital personnel ensure patients

Department of Agriculture updates Hay Directory

CHRISTI MILLER

Special to the Post-Telegraph

JEFFERSON CITY The Missouri Department of Agriculture announces changes to the department’s online Hay Directory, making it even easier for sellers and buyers of hay. The department manages the online hay directory, where livestock producers can search for hay made available by other producers in Missouri and other states.

“Times are tough in this extensive drought,” said

Director of Agriculture

Chris Chinn. “I’m thankful our team is able to provide resources to producers statewide. With new updates to the MDA Hay Directory, it will be even easier for producers to find what they need and ensure hay is available to their livestock.”

The MDA directory can be filtered by county or state and is regularly maintained by department staff. The List Your Hay section can be filtered by region of Missouri, hay type, bale type, bale weight, and unit. Producers can also review a lab analysis if the seller has provided one.

For more information

“48N48” about the Missouri Department of Agriculture and its programs, visit the department online at Agriculture.Mo.Gov. are transported and treated by the most appropriate facility for their conditions.

These fly boys broke the record for traversing mainland America, landing in each of the 48 states in less than 48 hours. Delta A350 Capt. Barry Behnfeldt and Aaron Wilson and technician Thomas Twiddy took off in their 1980 PA32R Piper Saratoga and landed in each of the contiguous 48 states from Michigan to Maine. And they made what they called their "48N48" trip not in 48 hours but in a record breaking 44 hours and seven minutes.

“We are incredibly honored to receive these stroke and STEMI designations,” said Wright Memorial CEO Steve Schiever. “But even more so, I’m incredibly proud of the hard work our staff has put in providing excellent care and ensuring that our standard of care is exceeding certain benchmarks put in place by The Joint Commission, the American Heart Association, the American Stroke Association, and the State of Missouri’s Health and Senior Services department. These designations validate our ongoing commitment to providing exceptional emergency care to our community.”

Serve Mercer County From Page 1

T-shirts will be available to those that register early. If you have helped before, use the Serve Mercer County yellow T-shirt from last year.

Elderly residents or those with medical needs are invited to register their projects for cleanup efforts by calling 660-748-4486 or 660-635-1921. Yard projects are ideal. Tools and equipment can be arranged in advance to complete projects.

Monetary donations for lumber and supplies can be sent to Serve Mercer County, c/o Princeton United Methodist Church, 804 E. Main, Princeton, MO 64673. To volunteer or register a project, forms are available at www.servemercercounty.com.

Have an original item you’d like published in the Princeton Post-Telegraph? Send it to us by email: posttele@grm.net.

Photos on a jpeg, please.

Despite AI, jobs still need human judgement

JOHN GRIMALDI Special to the Post-Telegraph

WASHINGTON Arthur C. Clarke’s classic sci-fi tale 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring a creepy computer named HAL, was made into a hit movie in 1968. Here we are, 55 years later, faced with what some are calling a scary, real life version of HAL. It’s called artificial intelligence (AI), a computer technology that some are saying is capable of depriving future generations of jobs. Actually, an Indian company recently fired the better part of its workforce, replacing its employees with fake, AI workers. The 31-year-old CEO of the e-commerce company, Suumit Shah, callously tweeted, “We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.”

Needless to say Shah took quite a bit of heat is an understatement. Social media was abuzz with criticism for what was seen as a heartless attitude. He took it in stride, however, with the message, “over time, everybody will start doing this.” In fact, according to CNBC, Goldman Sachs says that 300 million jobs could be affected by artificial intelligence.

However, the same

CNBC report quotes Sujith Abraham, senior VP of Salesforce ASEAN who says, “with its ability to supercharge human capabilities, AI should be used as a tool to empower the workforce rather than hindering or replacing them.” However, he added, “It is not without risk. This aspect is embedded in our generative AI guidelines that help guide responsible development and implementation of this transformative technology, that includes human participation.”

In reality, career coach Ashley Stahl says that, instead of machines taking away jobs in vast numbers in the future, “robots are probably not coming for your jobs, at least not yet.” In an article she penned for Forbes magazine, she put it this way: “Given how artificial intelligence has been portrayed in the media, in particular in some of our favorite sci-fi movies, it’s clear that the advent of this technology has created fear that AI will one day make human beings obsolete in the workforce. After all, as technology has advanced, many tasks that were once executed by human hands have become automated. It’s only natural to fear that the leap toward creating intelligent computers could herald the beginning of the end of work as we know it. But I don’t think there is any reason to be so fatalistic.”

Stahl cites an MIT task force report that says in the long run AI has its limitations. It can replicate “human intelligence in executing certain tasks, (but) its programs are typically only capable of ‘specialized’ intelligence, meaning they can solve only one problem, and execute only one task at a time. Often, they can be rigid, and unable to respond to any changes in input, or perform any ‘thinking’ outside of their prescribed programming. Humans, however, possess ‘generalized intelligence,’ with the kind of problem solving, abstract thinking and critical judgement that will continue to be important in business. (Thus) Human judgement will be relevant.”

Last week, the Vatican distributed a message re- garding the dangers of AI and “the need to be vigilant and to work so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices at the expense of the most fragile and excluded. The urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home, requires that ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law.”

PRINCETON Casey’s

EverCare Pharmacy

Hy-Vee Clinic Pharmacy

Snappy’s Store

Mercer Hometown Market

SOUTH LINEVILLE

Randy’s

Go figure

It is estimated that hundreds of millions of online buyers make purchases via Amazon. Cindy Smith of Prince William County, Va., is one of them, as is Liz Geltman of Washington, DC. That’s not the only thing they have in common. Back in May, Geltman reported that she received some 80 unsolicited packages of goods from the online “super” market over a period of time. More recently, Smith received more than 100 boxes containing a variety of products ranging from glue guns to binoculars. She, too, did not order the goodies she received. Believe it or not, according to the UPI news service: “Amazon officials said they looked into both incidents, and discovered both Smith and Geltman's packages were the result of vendors having packages shipped to random addresses in order to remove unsold merchandise from Amazon fulfillment centers.”