Have you heard about the doctor shortage? Most of us brush it aside, knowing we have all the doctors we need. But the reality is that we currently have about 15,000 fewer doctors to treat the population’s medical needs than we should, according to Sarah Kliff.
The Association of American Medical Colleges expects that number to soar to 63,000 as soon as 2015, according to Kliff, with the Affordable Care Act and its extension of health insurance to more people, and double by 2025.
Whose life hasn’t been affected by social media? But there are some for whom the very words can spell danger, and it’s probably not who you’re thinking of. Believe it or not, social media is proving very controversial in the medical world. Of course, the idea is a great one. Use it to stay in better touch with patients, sure, but some are “friending” people they treat, others revealing too much on Facebook, and even others getting hit with sexual harassment charges for tweets and posts.
It used to be that stroke victims were immediately treated with tissue plasminogen activators (tPA) to dissolve the clots that formed in the brain. But if more than three hours had passed, no dice, no guarantees, and it wasn’t effective for dissolving large clots, according to a story written by Janet Fang. But two new devices with better survival odds for picking stroke-causing blood clots out of the brain have been approved for clinical use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to The Los Angeles Times.
Twelve thousand patients die a year from preventable causes, a recent study conducted in the U.K. found. Now an $8.9 million grant will allow Johns Hopkins’ Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality try to put a stop to that. Studies show that, nationally, one in five patients is harmed during hospitalization and roughly 60 percent of those cases are preventable. In addition, with the right technology and systems in place, millions spent on patient readmissions could be avoided. Part of a new $500 million, 10-year program designed to eliminate all preventable harm that patients experience in the hospital, this grant will specifically focus on intensive care units, with the goal of preventing harm by better engaging patients — and their families — in their own care, “making them an integral part of the health care team,” according to a statement.
Okay, so a number of their governors have said slapped a big no to setting up health information exchanges in their state and others have reacted negatively to health insurance exchanges, but is the GOP really, as the head of an advocacy group representing millions of retired Americans proclaimed, “badly out of touch” with American workers and retirees? According to a poll conducted by Pew Research, more than seven in 10 Americans have heard of Republican vice president-designate Paul Ryan’s proposal to eliminate traditional Medicare, and among them, those who oppose the idea outnumber those who think it’s a great idea.
