Who is lorraine day md

With her extensive experience, she believed she could do the job justice. We had done lots of camping there, so we were familiar with the Kimberley. Both of our children have lived in Broome before one working as a pearl diver!

The people at KAMS are so welcoming. We found everyone to be really friendly. We had some friends in Broome and had the chance to connect with them. Not to mention, Broome is a place people like to visit, so we often have lots of friends visit us too! As Medical Director for our organisation, Lorraine has a number of responsibilities, including overseeing the clinical services team in KAMS remote clinics, Broome based clinical teams and overseeing research.

She also manages systems, procedures and governance. This forum ensures KAMS clinical teams across the sector are communicating well and sharing ideas across the region. If not, then we discuss what we can do as a region to improve that. COVID made this a necessity; we had to know what was happening in our clinics and hospitals, and how people moved between them. We had to ensure we established smooth transitions to ensure all our patients were looked after well.

She also oversees clinical services for regional and national disability services, including an early childhood support program. With all these different responsibilities, a day in the life of a Medical Director is never boring. If an external agency is undertaking a project that involves Aboriginal patients, they may invite me to participate to ensure culturally appropriate care.

But we all know that deep down, there are things behind illnesses, things in the background that people need to negotiate to be healthy. Born in Illinois, she was raised in Southern California. Her father was a Seventh Day Adventist minister with a firm hand. At age 9, she remembers, she dusted the house and awaited his inspection.

Day worked as a floor model to help pay her USC undergraduate bills. Then she worked as a dental hygienist and supported her first husband through law school. She was already outspoken: When interns and residents threatened to strike over working conditions, she stood up at a hospital meeting and argued, against virtually all her peers, that abandoning patients would be wrong. At the same time I was taking care of the pimp, because he burned his hands while he was holding her down.

It suggested that the use of lasers to burn off venereal warts could produce a plume of infectious smoke; physicians should use respirators to keep virus out of their lungs. She wrote to administrators at San Francisco General, conveying her concerns and asking that her elective-surgery patients--but not emergency-surgery patients--be tested and that the hospital investigate the dangers of aerosolized blood.

Elliot Rapaport, associate dean at San Francisco General, responded quickly: The notion of virus being transmitted through blood in the air was speculation, he said. Day continued to make waves. One weekend, she was treating an HIV-infected patient who had a sore on his heel so large and deep that when she examined it her fingers reached all the way under his footpad to the toes.

He had a temperature of degrees. He could have died of septic shock. The indicated procedure was to cut away the tissue, then clean out the wound with pulsing water. But when the water hits the wound, blood and water splash back at the surgeon. An option on the equipment was a plastic umbrella to intercept the spray. San Francisco General had none in stock, so Day told a nurse to get some from another hospital.

The nurse returned with five. The odds on getting HIV from a needle stick are 1 in What if I sold you a light switch that would only electrocute you once every times you touched it--maybe the first time, maybe the last? Day took a radical step. She began to wear full-body protection, complete with elaborate air filters.

Her new attire was quickly dubbed a space suit by the press. It did resemble a space suit, although it was hardly new to medicine. The suit had been designed 14 years earlier in England for use when surgeons were performing total knee and hip replacements. Her critics kept talking about proof. Laurens White, former president of the California Medical Assn. Day, however, was undeterred. Any chance was just that: a chance. Day turned in her resignation in August, , effective February, But surgery was no longer enjoyment for me.

My risk was getting too high. Current recommendations for operating-room protection call for knee-length rubber boots and a water-impermeable apron worn under the surgical gown, an extra pair of sleeves so that if one layer is soaked with blood it can be removed and replaced before the blood soaks through to the skin, two pairs of gloves and protective eye wear or face shields to protect against splatters that might hit the mucous membrane of the eye an acknowledged transmission route.

Recent events also have spotlighted the other side of the coin: physician-to-patient AIDS transmission. In Florida last year, a dentist was found to have infected three of his patients, although epidemiologists are not sure exactly how. There are a number of possible explanations, according to the CDC: The most likely is that somehow his blood mingled with theirs.

He may also have failed to properly disinfect his instruments. In the wake of the findings, the American Medical Assn.

In early April, the CDC proposed similar guidelines. In the January, , Journal of Medical Virology, two Stanford researchers reported testing aerosols, created by surgical tools, of HIV-contaminated blood. They demonstrated that the virus was present and viable in the aerosols, but they also concluded that the findings were insufficient to prove that aerosols created a risk in real operating rooms.

A study sponsored by the government and aimed at testing that risk, is now under way in San Francisco. The fact that medical personnel face increased risks of contracting AIDS has hit home with practitioners, and even her detractors think Day has helped get the message out. At the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons held in March in Anaheim, more than 3, surgeons voluntarily participated in an unprecedented study to determine if they had been exposed to HIV.

And consider Dr. Martin Gelbard, a urologic surgeon in Burbank. During an operation on an elderly female patient, he grew tired and stabbed himself with a suture.

He thought nothing more of it, until he learned the patient had tested positive for HIV. In her desert retreat, she talks about the future. So how is her own health? Day still fulminates about the situation. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing.

Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store.