The leaders of an Oakland, CA, union have been removed from office by their Washington bosses, the culmination of months of fighting.
The Service Employees International Union served the officers of the 150,000-member United Healthcare Workers West with a trusteeship notice. It appointed its executive vice presidents, Eliseo Medina and Dave Regan, as trustees. The two groups have been in a protracted disagreement over organizing and negotiating methods and how best to represent California's healthcare workers.
Doctors from the United States who rushed to the Gaza Strip to help the war wounded quickly found themselves operating on patients who had fallen victim to the 20-month-border closure that had crippled Gaza's healthcare system even before Israel's offensive against Hamas. Even before the war, Gaza's hospitals had run out of 250 of the basic 1,000 healthcare items, and were short on 105 of 480 essential drugs, said Mahmoud Daher, a representative of the World Health Organization.
Like most writers, when I'm assigned a long-form article I try to craft it in a way that doesn't just report on current happenings, but points out a few trends that might take hold in the near future. So it was with this month's cover story, Flat-World Healthcare.
In the article, I presented some key events that could perpetuate the medical travel movement. For instance, the increased pressure of U.S. businesses to pass along healthcare costs to employees will likely continue. So this could be an opportunity for businesses to add a medical travel benefit to let employees get the most cost-effective care since they will be shouldering more of the burden.
But with my lens so honed on the future, perhaps I didn't spell out bluntly enough a few of the big challenges facing medical travel today. With so much coverage on the topic over the past calendar year, I might have assumed this was well-treaded ground. However, recently a couple of readers e-mailed me to ask: What happens when the knee-replacement patient returns home to the U.S. and has a post-operative infection?
The good news is that after a year of reporting on global healthcare, I haven't yet heard of a post-operative complication that wasn't resolved. As we know, however, even in hospitals with outstanding complication rates, surgeries can go wrong.
I point out in HealthLeaders magazine that if employers push payers toward medical travel benefits, some of these continuity of care issues go away—for insured patients anyway. Post-op infections and other complications are things that global healthcare providers are actively addressing now, but I haven't yet seen a single best practice. Here are a few strategies I've heard of:
Some medical travel facilitators have agreements with local providers to accept their patients for post-op care. This could give the patient the comfort of knowing that there's a U.S. provider in place to assist in the case of complications. However, if this provider is in Florida, for instance, it wouldn't likely do much good for a patient in Spokane, WA.
I've also heard of global providers, such as Medtral New Zealand, that offer contingency insurance to cover the risk of major surgical complications.
Some global providers and facilitators are acting carefully and deliberately when it comes to continuity of care. Luke B. Johnson, director of international business development for Christus Health, tells me that Christus Muguerza won't accept a U.S. medical traveler who doesn't document a local physician for follow-up care.
Even though global providers and medical travel facilitators have rightly identified ways to deal with the continuity of care issue, the opportunity remains for an uninsured patient to fall between the gaps in care. That's why I'm interested in seeing how partnerships between U.S. and global providers might take shape in the coming years to create a true network solution of local and distant care providers.
Following reports of the fourth bird flu death in 2009, China has launched a daily bird flu reporting system for poultry and human cases, underscoring its concerns about potential epidemics. Agencies must now report to the Health Ministry, Agriculture Ministry, and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce every day about any infections in their areas. There will also be increased monitoring and management of live poultry markets.
The European Union is pushing for more cancer screenings across Europe, as less than half of the minimum recommended screenings are taking place. An EU report found that cancer is the second most common cause of death after heart problems. Officials say screenings must double in order to meet standards adopted in 2003.
Lee Sang-jun, president of the Arumdaun Nara Beauty Clinic Network, one of Korea's most well-known private hospitals for skin care and plastic surgery, has been recognized by the Culture, Sports and Tourism Minister for his efforts in promoting Korea's medical tourism industry. His idea of attracting international patients was formulated in 2000, and since then, the number of medical tourists traveling to Korea for procedures has climbed into the thousands.