Miscommunication over the latest updates to the pay system of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center has caused tension between the employees and managers of DHMC, the Valley News reported on Wednesday. Anonymous employees told the Valley News that DHMC had informed them in March that they would receive pay raises based solely on merit, rather than receiving their normal annual cost-of-living increase. According to DHMC officials, however, the center has not given workers across-the-board salary increases in at least 15 years and has always used a performance- based system when awarding raises, the Valley News said. Hospital spokesman Jason Aldous said changes were made to the pay system, but that previous media stories had incorrectly characterized the revisions as a fundamentally different approach, the Valley News reported. DHMC did not attempt to correct the public record because officials had planned to explain the issue to staff internally, officials told the Valley News.
Researchers at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practices released charts detailing a person's risk of death based on age, sex and smoking status in an effort to better inform the public about the relative significance of different health factors. The charts, published in the June issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute as the result of a study, found that the risk of death is higher for men than women, heart disease is the leading cause of death for men over 50 and smoking removes the equivalent of five to 10 years from a smoker's life. The study's authors -- Dartmouth Medical School professors Steven Woloshin, Lisa Schwartz and Gilbert Welch -- compiled data from the National Center for Health Statistics to determine age- and sex-linked death rates. The researchers then combined these findings with data on smoking prevalence and the relative risks of death from the National Health Interview Survey and the American Cancer Society's Cancer Prevention Study to determine the additional impact of smoking status.
Incidents of scientific fraud at universities are common but underreported, according to a survey published in the June 18 issue of the journal Nature. The survey compiled reports from 2,212 federally-funded scientists about cases of misconduct in their universities that they had witnessed personally. The survey's authors estimated that more than 2,300 acts of fraud, including fabrication or manipulation of data, occur nationally each year, but only 58 percent of these instances of misconduct are reported. The authors called for universities to investigate their researchers more rigorously, as federal rules require all institutions that receive government funding to self-regulate, or risk losing all federal grants. The federal Office of Research Integrity sponsored the survey, which was conducted with the assistance of the Gallup Organization.
