‘It Hurts Our Soul’: Nursing Home Workers Struggle With Thankless Position
Poorly rated long-term care facilities stand out in the COVID-19 crisis — but even the best are affected.
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Poorly rated long-term care facilities stand out in the COVID-19 crisis — but even the best are affected.
“An Arm and a Leg” is back sharing stories about the ways COVID-19 intersects with the cost of health care. To tackle a listener’s question about health coverage, Dan Weissmann spoke with one of the country’s top insurance nerds.
Health care providers are seeing the effects of climate change in hospitals across the U.S. ― and urging their peers to take action.
Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes wades through hundreds of health care policy stories each week, so you don't have to.
Many states are dramatically loosening regulations on nurse practitioners as the coronavirus pandemic increases demand for health care workers. But not California.
With hospitals struggling to get more ventilators, they must ensure every ventilator they have is ready for service. But manufacturers limit who can repair them.
Despite intense lobbying for a piece of the $100 billion bailout pot, big New York hospitals and rural systems alike say they aren’t getting a fair share.
The politics of COVID-19 are pretty polarized, but health experts across the ideological spectrum agree: The U.S. will need more robust testing before it’s safe to relax social-distancing requirements. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, Congress and the nation’s governors continue to spar over who should be responsible for what. Kimberly Leonard of Business Insider, Tami Luhby of CNN and Anna Edney of Bloomberg News join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss this and more. Also, for extra credit, the panelists suggest their favorite health policy stories of the week they think you should read, too.
Martha Phillips traveled to Sierra Leone during the Ebola epidemic in 2014 to serve as a nurse. Now, she's working on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, advising her colleagues on how to stay safe.
Nurse Divina “Debbie” Accad had cared for veterans for over 25 years and was set to retire in April. But after contracting the novel coronavirus, she spent her final 11 days on a ventilator — and didn’t survive past March.
Daisy Doronila had a different perspective than most who worked at the Hudson County Correctional Facility, a New Jersey lockup 11 miles from Manhattan. It was a place where the veteran nurse could put her Catholic faith into action, showing kindness to marginalized people.
The military is called to action to battle the pandemic, even as the numbers of people infected among its ranks and veterans climb amid a shortage of doctors and nurses.
Nurse Vianna Thompson, 52, spent two night shifts caring for a fellow Veterans Affairs health care worker who was dying from COVID-19. Two weeks later, she too was lying in a hospital intensive care unit, with a co-worker holding her hand as she died.
As efforts ramp up to collect blood plasma from the first survivors of COVID-19, families of critically ill patients are jockeying to obtain the still-unproven antibody treatment.
Dr. J. Ronald Verrier, a surgeon at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, spent the final weeks of his audacious, unfinished life tending to a torrent of patients inflicted with COVID-19. He died April 8 at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital in Oceanside, New York, at age 59, after falling ill from the novel coronavirus.
Jeff Baumbach, 57, was a seasoned nurse of 28 years when the novel coronavirus began to circulate in California. He’d worked in the ER, the ICU and on a cardiac floor. Hepatitis and tuberculosis had been around over the years but never posed a major concern.
Infection-report forms rarely indicate who is a health worker or whether they survived. States and hospitals tend to keep quiet, citing patient privacy.
In the first round of emergency relief, some states will get more than $300,000 per COVID-19 patient, while hard-hit New York gets just $12,000 per patient.
As part of the federal response to the coronavirus crisis, Medicare is offering to give hospitals and doctors accelerated payments.
Lack of protective gear and fears about all the unknown aspects of COVID-19 are parts of the mosaic of stress facing doctors and nurses on the front lines of the pandemic.
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