A new on-line tool for assessing nursing home quality just made available by the federal government may be the first step toward a pay-for-performance system for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, but nursing home officials say the five-star rating gives a flawed and incomplete picture.
The five-star ratings of 15,800 nursing homes nationwide can be found on the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services Web site.
It assigns ratings that range Read the rest of this entry »
CHICAGO, Nov 24 (Reuters) – Internal company documents
suggest Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N:
,
,
,
), maker of the antipsychotic
drug Risperdal, agreed to fund a child psychiatry research
center at Massachusetts General Hospital to generate data to
support use of the drug in children, the Wall Street Journal
reported on Monday.
The drug, known generically as risperidone, recently came
under fire from an advisory panel to the U.S. Food & Drug
Administration Read the rest of this entry »
WASHINGTON, Jan 22 (Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, hampered by increasing globalization and a rise
in complex products, may not be able to adequately protect the
public’s health, the watchdog arm of Congress said in new
findings released on Thursday.
“As a result, the American consumer may not be adequately
protected from unsafe and ineffective medical products,” the
U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in adding the
FDA Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Texas continues to trail the nation in providing access to emergency medical care for its residents while leading in the number of people without health insurance.
In a report released Tuesday, the American College of Emergency Physicians gave the state a “C” on emergency medical care issues. The group gave the state a failing mark for the access it provides residents to emergency medical care.
The group said Read the rest of this entry »
The report, “Ready or Not? Protecting the Public’s Health from Diseases, Disasters and Bioterrorism,” gave Nevada six out of 10 possible points for emergency preparedness, the same score it has received since 2005 and one point better than in 2004 and 2003.
Nevada was among eight states that scored six points out of 10 indicators. Only six states were ranked worse — Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska and Montana.
Five states Read the rest of this entry »
The Public Health Association of Australia is calling for a new national food policy, taking into account disease prevention, sustainability and social equity.
It wants a focus on diversity in diet, with an emphasis on whole foods and those shown to protect from disease, according to the report, A Future for Food Addressing public health, sustainability and equity from paddock to plate, to be issued today.
Association chief executive officer Read the rest of this entry »
The most basic way to prevent infections is to keep patients from being colonized by C.-diff. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Guidelines for Infection Control in Health Care Facilities notes that proper hand hygiene is the single most important factor in protecting patients from C.-diff. and other hospital-acquired infections. To complicate matters, the CDC advises that hands must be washed with soap and water when caring for Read the rest of this entry »
LIMA, Peru (CNN)
— A mayor in Peru has suggested that the federal government legalize illicit drugs and administer them through the national health ministry, a newspaper reported Friday.
Gustavo Sierra, mayor of the Surquillo district in Lima, said a federal drug law is hypocritical because it allows maximum legally allowed quantities for some drugs and plants but doesn’t say where to acquire them, the Peru 21 newspaper reported in a front-page Read the rest of this entry »
WASHINGTON (AP) — A new report shows that most low-income people who lose their jobs also are without health care insurance.
A study by the advocacy group Families USA says slightly more than half the nation’s unemployed cannot afford private insurance and also are not eligible for coverage under Medicaid.
The report focuses on middle-class and lower-income workers with annual incomes of about $44,100 for a family of four, or about double Read the rest of this entry »
The United States’ war on drugs has failed and will continue to do so
as long as it emphasizes law enforcement and neglects the problem of
consumption, a Washington think tank says in a report co-chaired by a
former president of Mexico.
The former president, Ernesto
Zedillo, in an interview, called for a major rethinking of U.S. policy,
which he said has been “asymmetrical” in demanding that countries such
as Mexico stanch the flow of drugs northward, Read the rest of this entry »