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Today’s healthcare industry has seen dramatic changes in the patient experience. The success of our advancements in healthcare and technology has created far more complex, chaotic interactions. From simple check-ups to operating room procedures, some might argue that today’s patient has become more of a number as opposed to a human being with personal preferences, feelings and emotions. Patient Experience Week (April 27-May 1, 2015) helps us to take a moment and center ourselves back to what is truly the heart of healthcare – care and compassion.

Nearly half of American hospitals aren't taking key steps to prevent a kind of gut infection that kills nearly 30,000 people annually and sickens hundreds of thousands more - despite strong evidence that such steps work, according to a new study. While nearly all of the 398 hospitals in the study use a variety of measures to protect their patients from Clostridium difficile infections, 48 percent haven't adopted strict limits on the use of antibiotics and other drugs that can allow the dangerous bug to flourish, the researchers report.

Research from the University of Manchester is bringing scientists a step closer to developing new therapies for controlling the body's response to allergies and parasitic worm infections.

Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp., have successfully developed a post-exposure treatment that is effective against a specific strain of the Ebola virus that killed thousands of people in West Africa.

Bars and street corners are ideal venues for broad dissemination of HIV prevention information among drug-using male sex workers and other at-risk populations, according to researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The research was published last week in the American Journal of Public Health.

As the current Ebola outbreak wanes, scientists have to make the most of every opportunity to prepare for future outbreaks. One such opportunity involves the identification of a safe and effective Ebola vaccine. Texas supercomputers have aided researchers in modelling which types of clinical trials will provide the best information. That's according to University of Texas at Austin researchers Steve Bellan and Lauren Meyers, who are studying Ebola vaccine trials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Aminata Kobie is a health promotion officer in WHO's Sierra Leone Country Office. When the first Ebola cases began to appear in May 2014 in Sierra Leone, Kobie traveled the country educating health workers and communities about the virus. As the outbreak spread throughout the country, Kobie spent months at a time educating her fellow Sierra Leoneans and visiting resistant communities where Ebola cases continued to occur.