The US Food and Drug Administration has a long wish list of changes it is considering for approving new drugs and making more prescription medications available over-the-counter. In a meeting with several reporters on Wednesday, FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg said the agency "is at the beginning of a process to determine how we can be more innovative" to improve access to certain drugs while at the same time curtailing the overuse of others.
Maine ranks second in the nation for deaths from Clostridium difficile spread in health care facilities, according to new data. Maine's mortality rate from the germ is 5.5 deaths per 100,000 people, second only to Rhode Island, where C. difficile results in 8.2 deaths per 100,000 people, according to Extending the Cure, a Washington, D.C.-based project on antibiotic resistance funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The board of the Patient Safety Authority adopted a resolution Tuesday saying Gov. Corbett's plan to fold it into the state Department of Health would destroy its autonomy. The privately funded authority, which collects and studies hospital data, has gained a national reputation for improving patient safety. Corbett, in his February budget proposal, said merging the authority into the Health Department would help forward his goal of streamlining state government and would "better utilize health information for public-policy purposes."
More than 14 years after Aaron Edwards was born with cerebral palsy, Florida senators Wednesday passed a bill that would require Lee Memorial Health System to pay $15 million to compensate him for its employees' negligence. The Lee County hospital system lobbied against the claims bill (HB 965), arguing it would take away money that could go toward caring for other children. But the Senate rejected an attempt Tuesday by Southwest Florida lawmakers to lower the payment to $7.25 million.
An excerpt from Ira Byock' forthcoming book, The Best Care Possible: A Physician's Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life. Byock is the director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Clinics that specialize in dispensing prescription painkillers would fall under more scrutiny under a bill House lawmakers passed Monday targeting the illegal drug trade. The legislation now heads to the state Senate. The bill steps up enforcement on clinics getting most of their money by prescribing large number of narcotic painkillers to patients, sometimes addicts, for little or no medical reason. The Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency estimates that the number of suspect clinics has jumped from none a few years ago to about 150 now. Crackdowns in neighboring states likely drove clinics to Georgia.