Health Care For Human

Tim Buck knows by heart how many people died from drug overdoses in his North Carolina county last year: 10. The year before it was 12 — an all-time high.

Those losses reverberate deeply in rural Pamlico County, a tightknit community of 12,000 on the state’s eastern shore. Over the past decade, it’s had the highest rate of opioid overdose deaths in North Carolina.

“Most folks know these individuals or know somebody who knows them,” said Buck, the county manager and a lifelong resident, who will proudly tell anyone that four generations of his family have called the area home. “We all feel it and we hate it when our folks hurt.”

Now, the county is receiving money from national settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors to address the crisis. But by the time those billions of dollars are divided among states and localities,

KHN senior correspondent Angela Hart appeared on Spectrum News 1’s “Los Angeles Times Today” on Nov. 29 to discuss her reporting on California’s pricey and ambitious experiment to transform its Medicaid program, called Medi-Cal.

The initiative, known as CalAIM, will provide some of Medi-Cal’s sickest and costliest patients with social services such as home-delivered healthy meals, help with housing move-in costs, and home repairs to make living environments safer for people with asthma.

But, as Hart noted, the reforms leave many patients behind. Hart spent time at MLK Community Hospital in South Los Angeles, where patients, health consumer advocates, and hospital executives told her that care hasn’t improved for the majority of patients, who don’t receive the new social services. They also told her that low reimbursement rates for doctors and other providers have created a “separate and unequal” system of care in a community

ATLANTA — Earlier this year, top leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began a monumental task: turning the sprawling, labyrinthine organization known for its highly specialized, academically focused scientific research into a sleek, flexible public health response agency primed to serve the American public. It’s an attempt to keep the CDC from repeating the mistakes it made while responding to covid-19.

But agency veterans, outside public health officials, and workplace organization experts said the current workplace structure could be a major barrier to that goal. Like directors before her, agency head Dr. Rochelle Walensky spends a considerable amount of time away from the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta. The agency has also embraced a workplace flexibility program that has allowed most of its scientists to stay remote.

As of October, 10,020 of the CDC’s 12,892 full-time employees — 78% of the full-time workforce — were allowed to work

Heather Meador y Anna Herber-Downey usan aplicaciones de citas en el trabajo, y su jefe lo sabe.

Ambas son enfermeras de salud pública en el Departamento de Salud Pública del condado de Linn, en el este de Iowa. Aprendieron que estas apps son la forma más eficiente de informar a los usuarios que algunas de las personas que conocieron en estos sitios pueden haberlos expuesto a infecciones de transmisión sexual (ITS).

Un surgimiento a nivel nacional de las ITS, con un aumento del 10% y 7% respectivamente en casos informados de gonorrea y sífilis, de 2019 a 2020, según los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC), está siendo implacable con Iowa. El dúo descubrió que la llamada telefónica, un método tradicional de rastreo de contactos, ya no funciona bien.

“Cuando comencé hace 12 años, llamábamos a todos”, dijo Meador, supervisora de la rama