Health and Disability

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Hospitals are redesigning intensive care units to make them safer and less dehumanizing, with a new focus on engaging families and patients in decisions.

Oral health is an important but often overlooked part of health and insurance coverage. State Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) are required to cover children’s dental services (and children’s access to care has been improving over the last ten years), but coverage for adults is optional. As noted in a recent Health Affairs GrantWatch Blog post, only about 15 states offer extensive coverage for adult dental services in Medicaid.

Medicare does not cover most dental services. And most private dental coverage is offered through stand-alone dental products that are separate from medical plans. Overall, this has resulted in more than 2.5 times as many Americans going without dental coverage as medical coverage.

Inadequate access to dental care is costly. Many low-income individuals turn to the emergency department as their primary and only source of care for oral health needs. The American Dental Association estimates that emergency room visits for avoidable oral health-related visits cost the U.S. health care system as much as two billion dollars per year. A recent Narrative Matters feature in Health Affairs (“Navigating Veronika”) highlighted the steep barriers that low-income individuals can face in navigating the dental safety net and finding a provider who will treat them, even when Medicaid covers the costs of care.

Staph infections are common problems in health care facilities, and manyStaphylcoccus aureus bacteria are now resistant to drug treatment.

Chances are you've heard of MRSA, which is the kind of staph that isn't susceptible to methicillin, the antibiotic that used to be a silver bullet.

Staph is happy to live on your skin or up your nose. A person can harbor the bacteria and wind up spreading them without showing any signs of infection. A third of peoplecarry staph in their noses, according to studies cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 2 percent of people carry MRSA.

The researchers also took weekly bacterial samples from the people's noses and used genetic tests to fingerprint the staph. That way the scientists could trace the movement of bacteria from person to person.

The scheme worked.

Over four months of tracking and testing, the researchers mapped the hops that bacteria made from one person to another to another. They documented 173 transmissions of staph between people in the study. About a third of patients who had been free of staph when admitted were colonized within a month.

f Mom’s physician couldn’t find the source of her pain, he may have referred her to a specialist.  Mom may not remember or may not want to go.  Pain is the most common symptom of injury and disease, neither of which are considered “normal” or “just part of getting old.” Without pain control, people suffering from chronic pain (lasting more than 3-6 months) frequently become isolated from friends and family, suffer from sleeplessness, decreased appetite, anxiety, depression, and feelings of hopelessness.

More than half a million Americans will develop Alzheimer's disease this year, but as many as half will never be told their diagnosis, according to a new report.

Doctors are reluctant to give the bad news, are afraid of the reaction, or fear they won't be believed, the Alzheimer's Association says. But Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers say they want to know.

"I think to have a diagnosis gives you at least a place to start," says Mary Downs of Reston, Virginia. Downs should know — she cares for her mother-in-law Helen, who at 83 has a diagnosis, and for her own mother, Lois, who has some symptoms but has not been diagnosed.

"There are some things with this disease we can control," Downs told NBC News. "We can have a plan for helping the person with a disease. When Helen got the diagnosis, we had a chance as a family to say, 'We know she has this.' It kind of gave us the chance to sit down and ask, 'What do the next years with her look like?'"

"We set out to create a type of bandage that could detect bedsores as they are forming, before the damage reaches the surface of the skin," said Michel Maharbiz, a UC Berkeley associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the smart-bandage project.

"We can imagine this being carried by a nurse for spot-checking target areas on a patient, or it could be incorporated into a wound dressing to regularly monitor how it's healing."

The researchers exploited the electrical changes that occur when a healthy cell starts dying. They tested the thin, non-invasive bandage on the skin of rats and found that the device was able to detect varying degrees of tissue damage consistently across multiple animals.

"The genius of this device is that it's looking at the electrical properties of the tissue to assess damage. We currently have no other way to do that in clinical practice," said Harrison. "It's tackling a big problem that many people have been trying to solve in the last 50 years. As a clinician and someone who has struggled with this clinical problem, this bandage is great."

About 5% of Ontarians, more than 568,000 people over the age of 12, suffer from ES/MCS (environmental sensitivities/multiple chemical sensitivity), ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/ chronic fatigue syndrome) and FM (fibromyalgia). These already large numbers, which represent only those who have been diagnosed with these conditions, are on the rise.

An unknown but significant number of children are also affected.

Though medical research is providing ever-greater insight, at present Ontario lags significantly behind several jurisdictions in its capacity to help people living with these often painful and debilitating conditions. Our major community consultation found only a ‘void in care with a few tiny islands of support.

This site is dedicated to raising awareness about these conditions and advocating for the creation of a leading edge, patient-centred health care delivery system for people with these chronic, complex environment-associated illnesses. This system has been provisionally named the Ontario Centre of Excellence in Environmental Health (OCEEH).

Hospice does not speed up death. If two terminally ill patients had identical issues, the one in hospice care would probably live longer. During my years of hospice volunteering in Detroit, Michigan nursing homes, I rarely had patients leave hospice alive.

Who leaves hospice alive? Discharges can occur when patients decide to resume curative care, when their conditions improve beyond hospice guidelines, or when hospices inappropriately use live discharge to avoid costly hospitalizations. A national study of live discharges from hospice stated that approximately 1 in 5 hospice patients is discharged alive with variation by hospice programs and by geographic regions. Connecticut has the lowest rate, and Mississippi has the highest. Not-for-profit hospices and older hospices have lower rates of live discharge.

A new mobile app is set to transform the care of patients with long-standing pain issues. Designed and developed in collaboration between the Keele University Institute of Primary Care & Health Sciences and Keele University Science & Business Park-based software developers Secret Attic, the app allows patients to use their smartphone to record their levels of wellbeing each day.

The information tracked by the app can then be used by their doctor to review how well the patient is responding to medication, enabling them to ensure that the patient is receiving the best treatment for their condition.