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School nurses treat children daily for a wide range of illnesses and injuries, and sometimes serve as a young patient’s only health provider. They also function as a point person for critical public health interventions. Yet many states don’t require them, and school districts struggle to hire them.
KFF Health News senior correspondent Angela Hart leads a discussion about the role women play as California grapples with a shortage of health care providers.
Fall is the time when enrollees in the federal program for older people and people with certain disabilities can make changes to their health and drug plans. The decision can be complicated, but here are some key points to keep in mind.
KFF Health News and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and local media this week to discuss their stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances.
Submissions are open for KFF Health News’ fifth annual Halloween Haiku competition. Send us your best scary poems — if you dare.
Flu, covid, and respiratory viruses kill thousands of Americans each year, but the latest batch of vaccines could save lives.
A rise in cases of Vibrio vulnificus and its spread northward have heightened concern about the bacterium, which can cause human tissue to rot and skin to decay. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to make more doctors aware of the dangerous pathogen.
A bitterly divided Congress managed to keep the federal government running for several more weeks, while House Republicans struggle — again — to choose a leader. Meanwhile, many people removed from state Medicaid rolls are not finding their way to Affordable Care Act insurance, and a major investigation by The Washington Post attributes the decline in U.S. life expectancy to more than covid-19 and opioids. Lauren Weber of The Washington Post, Victoria Knight of Axios, and Sarah Karlin-Smith of the Pink Sheet join KFF Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner to discuss these issues and more. Also this week, Rovner interviews physician-author-playwright Samuel Shem about “Our Hospital,” his new novel about the health workforce in the age of covid.
California is the first state to ban the controversial diagnosis known as “excited delirium,” which has been used increasingly to justify excessive force by law enforcement. A human rights advocate described the law, signed this week by Gov. Gavin Newsom, as a “watershed moment” in criminal justice.
New HIV infections occur disproportionately among Black women, but exclusionary marketing, fewer treatment options, and provider wariness have limited uptake of preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, drugs, which reduce the risk of contracting the virus.
Congress is beginning to take action on the Social Security Administration’s clawbacks of payments it mistakenly made to poor, retired, and disabled Americans.
A new rule sets specific treatment metrics for suspected sepsis cases in an effort to reduce deaths, but some experts say the measures could add to antibiotic overuse and need to be more flexible.
Pharmaceutical patents can drive up the costs of lifesaving medications. Hear what author and YouTube star John Green is doing to make tuberculosis drugs more accessible to the people who need them most.
Narcan is available without a prescription. Addiction treatment experts hope this move will increase access to the medication, which can reverse opioid overdoses. But hurdles remain: cost and stigma.
Teresa Johnson has been in extreme pain for more than a year after what she believes was a severe allergic reaction to iodine. Her Medi-Cal plan approved her referral to a specialist, but it took her numerous phone calls, multiple complaints, and several months to book an appointment.
In a torrent of lawsuits, patients accuse Florida device maker Exactech of hiding knee and hip implant defects for years. The company denies the allegations.
Trust is hard to build and easy to break. In Episode 6 of the “Eradicating Smallpox” podcast, meet Chandrakant Pandav, a health worker who used laughter and song to try to rebuild trust with communities harmed by India’s sometimes violent and coercive family planning campaign.
Former President Donald Trump, who’s running for another term in the White House, recently blamed drug shortages on his successor, President Joe Biden. Our findings don’t align with Trump’s claims; by some measures, drug shortages increased more on Trump’s watch than on Biden’s.
Many women, especially Black women, have reported discrimination in maternity care, but expectant mothers lack tools to see where this happens. Funding and regulations to measure disparities have been slow in arriving, but some innovators are trying to fill the void.
Software sifts through millions of medical records to match patients with similar diagnoses and characteristics and then predicts what kind of care an individual will need and for how long. New federal rules will ensure human experts are part of the process.
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