Tag Archives | Health Care

Best Way To Reduce Infection Risk In Hospitals? Open The Windows!

By on April 26, 2013 in News 0

University College Hospital, 235 Euston Road, NW1 - geograph.org.uk - 671049How often do you see open windows in hospitals? Hardly ever, right? As reported by BBC News, opening those grimy windows could decrease risk of infection fourfold:

Keeping the windows open on traditional NHS wards can dramatically reduce the risk of infection, say researchers.

The University of Leeds study suggests closing windows, for example to cut heating bills, increases the risk of infection fourfold.

The researchers used experiments and computer modelling to map the passage of air and germs through wards.

They say fitting household extractor fans to windows could maintain sufficient air flow in winter.

The study looked at air flow in traditional “Nightingale wards”, built as open wards of around 30 beds with opening windows and named after Florence Nightingale, who set out the principles of ward design in the 19th Century.

Balloons filled with carbon dioxide – to represent an airborne pathogen – were popped and the gas followed throughout the ward using tracer devices.

… Read the rest

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Hospital Medical Devices Increasingly Riddled With Computer Viruses

By on October 31, 2012 in News 11

Technology Review on the looming hazard of malware causing deadly misfunction in the era of digitalized medical care:

Computerized hospital equipment is increasingly vulnerable to malware infections, according to participants in a recent government panel. These infections can clog patient-monitoring equipment and other software systems, at times rendering the devices temporarily inoperable.

Olson told the panel that infections have stricken many kinds of equipment, raising fears that someday a patient could be harmed. “We also worry about situations where blood gas analyzers, compounders, radiology equipment, nuclear-medical delivery systems, could become compromised to where they can’t be used, or they become compromised to the point where their values are adjusted without the software knowing,” he said. He explained that when a machine becomes clogged with malware, it could in theory “miss a couple of readings off of a sensor [and] erroneously report a value, which now can cause harm.”

… Read the rest

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Supreme Court Upholds Main Part Of Obamacare

By on June 28, 2012 in News 35

UpstateNYer (CC)

The U.S. Supreme Court has finally decided to uphold the critical part of President Obama’s controversial health care law. Expect some Tea Party fireworks just in time for Independence Day next week… Robert Barnes and N.C. Aizenman report for the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the individual health-insurance mandate that is at the heart of President Obama’s landmark health-care law, saying the mandate is permissible under Congress’s taxing authority.

The potentially game-changing, election-year decision — a major victory for the White House less than five months before the November elections –will help redefine the power of the national government and affect the health-care choices of millions of Americans.

Passage of the legislation by the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010 capped decades of efforts to implement a national program of health care. The legislation is expected to eventually extend health-care coverage to more than 30 million Americans who currently lack it…

[continues at the Washington Post]… Read the rest

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Not What the Doctor Ordered: 20 Million Could Lose Employer Coverage

By on May 9, 2012 in News 26

Obama Signs Health CareIn all the hand-wringing over the last two months for Obamacare by “liberal” apologists, little has actually been said about the actual effects of the law. True, whether or not Obamacare is beneficial has little if anything to do with its constitutionality. (And the actual Constitutional issues involved, however valid, have little to do with the cynical politics behind the Supreme Court’s right-wing block in the case.) But you’d think if someone was gonna go to bat for a law, they’d at least acknowledge the law’s merits.

Hence one story that caught my eye in March: “20 million could lose employer coverage under Obama health care overhaul.” The source, the World Socialist Web Site, may not be acceptable to the media establishment, but the primary source for the WSWS certainly is: the Congressional Budget Office. Here’s what the CBO concludes:

As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-sponsored coverage in 2019 under the health care legislation signed into law by President Obama in March 2010…
The CBO’s most optimistic estimate, which the federal agency says is subject to a “tremendous amount of uncertainty,” is that 3 million to 5 million could lose their employer health coverage each year from 2019 through 2022.

… Read the rest

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Hospitals Begin Planting Debt Collectors In Emergency Rooms

By on April 26, 2012 in News 36

254668516_97856d3d0fThe New York Times reports on a new model of emergency care—debt collectors posing as medical staff:

Hospital patients waiting in an emergency room or convalescing after surgery are being confronted by an unexpected visitor: a debt collector at bedside.

This and other aggressive tactics by one of the nation’s largest collectors of medical debts, Accretive Health, were revealed on Tuesday by the Minnesota attorney general, raising concerns that such practices have become common at hospitals across the country.

To patients, the debt collectors may look indistinguishable from hospital employees, may demand they pay outstanding bills and may discourage them from seeking emergency care at all. The attorney general, Lori Swanson, also said that Accretive employees may have broken the law by not clearly identifying themselves as debt collectors…

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Justice Scalia Now Seems More Skeptical About ‘Obamacare’ Than Home-Grown Marijuana

By on March 29, 2012 in News 5

Antonin ScaliaCan’t make this stuff up. Reid Pillifant writes on Capital New York:

To some longtime observers of the Supreme Court, the surprising part of yesterday’s oral argument wasn’t that Justice Anthony Kennedy critically questioned the individual mandate; it was the harshly skeptical tone from Justice Antonin Scalia.

Scalia, one of the court’s most outspoken characters, has long been an originalist villain to those on the left, but there was a distinct strain of thought, at least among some constitutional scholars, that he might be inclined to look favorably upon the Affordable Care Act.

That idea rested primarily on his concurrence in Gonzales v. Raich, a 2005 case out of California, in which the court found that the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce extended to marijuana that was grown at home solely for personal consumption…

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Why the Supreme Court Should Kill ‘Obamacare’

By on March 27, 2012 in News 18

ObamacareToday, the anti-Obamacare protest is happening in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is hearing arguments as to why the Affordable Healthcare Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”) should be thrown out. Dave Lindorff writes on Counterpunch on why “Obamacare” should be repealed to instead force Americans to decide that Medicare should be available to everyone as it would reduce our costs substantially:

The US Supreme Court has a chance to do the people of America a big favor, perhaps atoning at last for its shameful betrayal of the electoral system in 2000 when a conservative majority stole the Florida, and national election, for George W. Bush, and for the liberal-led and equally shameful betrayal of fundamental property rights in the Kelo v New London case that, in 2005, upheld the public theft of private homes in Connecticut on behalf of a government-backed resort development. The court can atone for these betrayals by declaring the ramshackle, corrupt, hugely expensive and cynically misnamed Affordable Care Act to be unconstitutional.

… Read the rest

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Twenty Percent Of Americans Had Mental Illness In Last Year

By on January 21, 2012 in News 43

A shocking statistic, made worse when you learn that 60% of the mentally ill did not receive any treatment. From MedPage Today:

About 20% of American adults reported having had a mental illness during the preceding year, a government survey found.

The figure rose to almost 30% of those in the 18 to 25 age group, compared with 14.3% of patients 50 and older, according to researchers from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

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And of the nearly 46 million U.S. adults who reported having had a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder when surveyed in 2010, some 60% didn’t receive any treatment for the condition.

The most common reason for not getting mental healthcare was not being able to afford it.

The researchers noted that although the 20% figure is “relatively high,” just 5% reported having serious issues that interfered with their normal activities.

Although more of those with serious mental illness reported receiving treatment, a large proportion — 39% — didn’t receive any mental health services.

… Read the rest

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