Bill Created After Doctor’s Suicide Aims To Help Burned-Out Health Workers
As The Washington Post reports, the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act, which unanimously passed the U.S. Senate last month, would provide grant funding for suicide-prevention and peer-support mental health care programs at health care facilities and more.
The Washington Post:
Va. Relatives Of Front-Line Doctor Who Died By Suicide Press House To Pass Physicians’ Mental Health Bill
Before she died in April 2020, one of the last academic articles Lorna Breen co-authored focused on the “alarming prevalence” of burnout among emergency-department clinicians, and what was to be done about it. But if Breen, an emergency-department physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, was ever experiencing burnout herself, she didn’t show it, her family says. She had no history of mental illness, no bouts of anxiety or depression, and that was what made what happened to Breen feel so implausible after the pandemic hit, said her sister, Jennifer Feist. Weeks into the pandemic, Breen fell ill with covid-19. After she recovered, she promptly returned to work at the hospital. Twenty-four days later, she died by suicide in Charlottesville, where her family lives and where she is from — feeling overwhelmed by the onslaught of dying covid-19 patients. (Flynn, 9/15)
In other news about health care workers —
Salt Lake Tribune:
Worker Dies After MRI Machine Falls At University Of Utah Hospital
A worker was killed Wednesday when an MRI machine fell to the ground outside University of Utah Hospital, officials said in a news conference. Workers were moving the medical imaging machine from the fourth floor to the first floor of the hospital around 11 a.m. when it fell near a loading dock on the west side of the building, just north of the School of Medicine. The hospital stated in a news release that the worker killed was not a hospital employee and had been part of a team contracted to move the device. The worker fell alongside the machine. He was taken to the hospital’s emergency department, where he died. Another contracted worker suffered a minor injury. (Miller, 9/15)
New Orleans Times-Picayune:
Doctor And Former Tammany Coroner Candidate Indicted For $5 Million In Illegal Opioid Scrips
As the opioid crisis spiraled in 2015, Dr. Adrian Dexter Talbot allegedly signed off on prescriptions to 81 different patients in a single day — most of them for pain medication with a "high potential for abuse. "Most general practitioners like Talbot are only able to see about 20 patients a day, according to a 2018 survey of American physicians by the Physicians Foundation. A federal grand jury in New Orleans recently indicted Talbot, 55, on seven counts of illegal dispensation of controlled substances "not for a legitimate medical purpose." The indictment claims he illegally prescribed over a million doses of oxycodone, morphine and other opioids and defrauded health care benefit programs of $5.1 million from February 2015 to July 2018. (Pierce, 9/15)
The Washington Post:
A Woman Saw A Gynecologist For Nine Years. Then She Discovered He Was Her Biological Father, Lawsuit Claims
After nine years of regular vaginal and breast examinations with her gynecologist, Morgan Hellquist slowly came to a distressing realization. The doctor whom she had trusted with countless examinations was, she suspected, her biological father. The first inkling came during an appointment this April, Hellquist alleges in a lawsuit filed this weekend. Hellquist had never known her biological father, having been conceived via artificial insemination and born in September 1985. But she knew one thing, according to the lawsuit: The doctor, Morris Wortman, facilitated the artificial impregnation of her mother, though she and her family believed it had involved the sperm of a medical student. (Mark, 9/15)
In updates on the Theranos trial —
The Wall Street Journal:
Elizabeth Holmes Trial: Ex-Employee Says She Was Rebuffed In Attempt To Raise Alarms
A former Theranos Inc. lab worker testified Wednesday that she raised alarms about the blood-testing startup’s practices with colleagues, managers and even a top executive and a board member but was rebuffed at every turn. ... Over two days of testimony, Ms. Cheung testified that Theranos’s highly publicized proprietary technology often didn’t work, and that the company cut corners to give the impression that its product was ready for wide-scale use by patients. (Randazzo, 9/15)
