Students at five Oakland, CA, schools will have access to free healthcare as part of a $3 million grant from Kaiser Permanente to provide services to children who would otherwise end up in the emergency room or with no care at all. The clinics will offer care in mental health, sexually transmitted infections, chronic disease management and other day-to-day health problems. In addition, the clinics will provide preventive health education.
San Francisco's budget landscape is the worst it has been in years, and the Public Health Department is facing the worst financial outlook anybody can remember. Doctors, nurses and patients are alarmed about the looming cuts, which total $33 million. Proposed public health cuts include closing the worker's compensation clinic at San Francisco General Hospital, closing Buster's Place, a 24-hour drop-in center for homeless people to receive referrals to housing and services, and reducing hours for the oral surgery clinic and operating rooms at San Francisco General.
St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, CA, is under state investigation for mistakenly doing knee-repair surgery on a patient's good knee. The incident is the third "wrong-site" procedure to occur at the hospital since January 2006. The California Department of Public Health investigation marks the second time in a few months that a well-known Southern California hospital has come under public scrutiny for medical mistakes.
Kaiser Permanente has suspended a physician who handled high-risk pregnancies at its Fresno, CA, hospital. Perinatologist Hamid Safari allegedly botched at least two deliveries after staff members began raising concerns about his skills and demeanor. In January, federal inspectors criticized the way Kaiser responded to complaints about Safari and said that had the hospital kept a closer watch over its medical staff, two babies might still be alive.
Physicians across Egypt complain of long hours, shrinking respect for their profession, lack of medicine and broken equipment. The nation's doctors have been protesting for weeks and have set a March deadline for a nationwide strike. The Doctors Union is demanding an immediate minimum monthly salary of 1,000 pounds or about $180 for the 93,000 physicians working directly for the state. The current starting monthly pay for doctors in Egypt can be as low as $23.
Hartford (CT) Hospital's incoming president and CEO Elliot Joseph says that the nation's healthcare system is broken, and that improvements must come from within the boardrooms and examining rooms of individual healthcare institutions. The Hartford Hospital board of directors chose Joseph as its new chief because of his experience in transforming a loosely knit group of seven hospitals and 125 outpatient centers in Michigan into a coordinated system of care. During the national search for a CEO, the board noticed that Hartford lags behind the nation in consolidating disparate health care providers.
A congressional committee is asking whether the FDA's recent lapse in allowing a plant it never inspected to export to the U.S. is part of a larger problem of poor oversight and a shortage of resources at the agency. Although FDA officials insist the agency inspects every foreign plant sending medical products to the U.S., the agency's own data make it appear unlikely. An FDA-appointed commission that studied the agency's inspection record found the FDA is short of financial resources, has cut personnel, has rickety data management systems and is struggling to meet its oversight obligations.
A Massachusetts General Hospital neurologist wants to learn whether therapy administered in Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Lab, can have benefits in the real world. An instructor from Mass. General will soon lead 20 to 40 Second Life recruits through guided meditations designed to reduce their stress levels. The study could help draw doctors, patients, and money to Second Life, if they prove that therapies offered virtually can be effective in the real world.
In a promising sign that Massachusetts' healthcare initiative is succeeding, use of the "free care pool" dropped by about 16 percent in the program's first year. State officials project an even bigger free care decline in 2008, and that the decline will bring savings of about $240 million. That drop is expected to come not only from insuring more people, but also from changes in the way hospitals are paid and in who is eligible for free care.
The skirmish between the presidential candidates over the mechanics of universal health coverage will soon give way to a different general-election debate--about whether universal coverage should even be a national priority. In the primaries, Democratic candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama magnified their differences over making health insurance mandatory. Senator John McCain agrees with the Democrats that the health system needs major repair, but his solution would stress cost-containment over assuring coverage for all.
