Dear hospital, The last three years, I have had the pleasure of working in our state’s renowned emergency department and level-1 trauma center. My departure closes out a decade of my nursing career as an emergency room and flight nurse. This depa…
Category: Policy
How nurse practitioners can expand abortion access
It has been a savage few months for reproductive rights, with 12 states passing 26 bills to ban abortion, including measures that ban abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, as well as attempting to outlaw safe methods of abortion. In the face o…
These medical students support Medicare for all. Here’s why.
The most difficult part of our first year of medical school wasn’t memorizing anatomy or mastering the patient interview, but seeing firsthand how broken our current health care system is. We pay twice as much as other wealthy nations for health care, …
Is medicine really a model family-friendly profession?
An article in the New York Times touting medicine as a family-friendly profession has stirred up critics who say it denies the reality of career sacrifice and gaps in leadership and pay that female physicians face. Writer Claire Cain Miller profiled fe…
It’s time to seriously study gun violence
I have been working on gun violence prevention for the past two years. After the Las Vegas shooting, I worked with a fellow medical student to create a course teaching medical students about gun violence and how it relates to medicine. We taught future…
Why the Lancet’s editorial on Kashmir is unhelpful
If Rudolph Virchow’s observation that “medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine writ large” is true, then medicine is bias writ large because politics is nothing but bias on steroids. Virchow’s maxim is now adopted by medical j…
The story of a hospital collapse and how small towns were devastated
The money was so good in the beginning, and it seemed it might gush forever, right through tiny country hospitals in Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and into the coffers of companies controlled by Jorge A. Perez, his family, and business partners. It was…
How closing rural hospitals cost patient lives
For more than 30 minutes, Robert Findley lay unconscious in the back of an ambulance next to Mercy Hospital Fort Scott on a frigid February morning with paramedics hand-pumping oxygen into his lungs. A helipad sat just across the icy parking lot from t…
An attorney pushes back on a physician’s critique of the medical liability system
I was struck by a post by Dr. Saurabh Jha about his views of the jury system — as some of his comments mirrored things I’ve said to juries in the past. Some things he got right, which go to the core our civil justice system. Some things, however, not s…
Quality improvement: Helping boost everyone’s triple aim
Recently, the Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH), L.A. Care Health Plan, and the Southwest Pediatric Practice Transformation Network (a partnership of CHOC Children’s Hospital and Rady Children’s Hospital) came together to announce some incredible…
