Seven Pies for Seven Digits

George Dover wearing a shaving cream pie.

For the past 13 years, the morning deejays at Baltimore's MIX 106.5 FM, JoJo Girard and Kenny Campbell, have held a radiothon to raise money for the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. During that time, they raised $4.7 million. But this year, in just four days, they reached $1 million.

The total was announced on the morning of Monday, March 4, from the plastic-wrapped Children's Center Zoo Lobby. There, children hurled seven pies (one for each digit in the $1,000,325.47 total) at the assembled crew from MIX 106, plus Children's Center Director George Dover. Dover got the cream of the crop-a shaving cream pie. The others were blasted with pies made of coleslaw, baked beams, peanut butter and jelly, and pancake batter. Still, according to Dover, it was better than eating bugs, which the three did last year.
Children's Center fund raisers were particularly pleased with the generosity of listeners, who pledged three-fourths of the total. They had made it easy to give. The most popular package was $12 for 12 months, deducted directly from your checking account. In this case, Sept. 11 only seemed to have a positive effect.

More of Hopkins on the Web

Gastroenterology is the latest Hopkins specialty to launch its own Web site. Anyone with questions about digestive diseases now can turn to the Johns Hopkins Gastroenterology and Hepatology Resource Center, www.hopkins-gi.org, for answers.

More than 20 Johns Hopkins physicians-including gastroenterologists, hepatologists, surgeons, radiologists and pathologists-contribute to the site. They are all actively involved in the care of patients with digestive diseases like hepatitis B, Crohn's disease, swallowing disorders and colon cancer. The site includes more than 2,000 Web pages and approximately 1,000 original medical images. Relevant abstracts of current medical journal articles have been compiled so visitors can stay up to date in this field of medicine. There were 1.4 million hits to the site last month. One visitor said he'd learned more about his wife's condition in a few minutes on the Web site than he had in 20 years of taking her to doctors.

The site also includes Spanish, Chinese and Japanese foreign language translations for the growing international audience of health professionals and patients seeking help with tough digestive-disease questions.

Practice Makes Perfect

Otolaryngologist Paul Flint, left, with surgeon Keith Lillemoe, practicing minimally invasive surgery.

The Department of Surgery at Hopkins Hospital has opened a training laboratory for today's surgeons to learn and perfect the minimally invasive techniques of tomorrow.
Launched Feb. 6 with $3.5 million in funding from U.S. Surgical and equipment donations from Stryker Communications and Steris Corp., the new center offers specialists at Hopkins and elsewhere a place to practice minimally invasive surgeries on animate and inanimate models and mannequins. It also provides a venue for surgical and medical device companies to test new instruments.

Known as the Johns Hopkins/United States Surgical Minimally Invasive Surgical Training Center (MISTC), the facility features two laboratory training areas with a total of nine operating tables, a state-of-the-art conference room with seating for 35, locker rooms and office space. Robotic surgery may be performed in either suite. Faculty and trainers standing at the conference room's podium can view and discuss operations conducted in the next room. Telemedicine capabilities will allow lectures to be broadcast anywhere in the world and permit physicians to direct operations in distant locations.

MISTC also will serve as a home base for continuing medical education courses for Hopkins residents and faculty.

Hopkins is one of a handful of medical centers in the country to host one of U.S. Surgical's "Training Centers of Excellence." Others nearby are at Duke University Medical Center and the Medical College of Virginia.

The center provides "new training ground not only for surgeons but also for anesthesiologists, cardiologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists and all others interested in perfecting and learning advanced surgical techniques," says otolaryngologist Paul Flint, co-director of the center. "It also will allow us to develop new technology to better care for our patients."

"This new facility provides an opportunity for considerable synergism between the research, development and utilization of the surgical techniques of the future," says surgeon Gregory Bulkley, the other co-director. "It is therefore particularly relevant to Hopkins' mission of patient care, research and teaching."

The center occupies renovated space most famously inhabited in the 1940s by the late Hopkins surgeon Alfred Blalock. It was there that Blalock rehearsed the operation that was the first to successfully repair the hearts of "blue babies," so named because their congenital heart defects left them blue from lack of oxygen.

Shrinking the Nursing Shortage

Who provided more new nurses than any other nursing school in the state in 2001?
The Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing.

The statistics, released by the Maryland Board of Nursing last month, showed that 165 out of 175 Hopkins students passed the National Council Licensure Examination, giving them a formal license to practice nursing. The next biggest group came from the University of Maryland, where 138 nursing students passed their exam.