closer look
Using tech tools to thwart violence against health care workers
Adobe
Health care workplace violence isn't new. But some of the tools to deal with it are. Violent incidents had been rising steadily before the pandemic, but threats, bullying, and other hostile actions from colleagues and patients surged with Covid, more than doubling in 2022 compared to 2018. "It's a scary place — people are sick, they're oftentimes confused when they're in the hospital and ill, they get frustrated very easily," said Marc Larsen, an emergency medicine physician at St. Luke's, a Kansas City health system with 16 hospitals.
That's prompted hospitals to boost their physical security, STAT's Mohana Ravindranath reports. For many, that has meant swapping out the standard hospital room distress buttons for higher-tech systems that track incidents in real time. Workers wear panic buttons on badges that allow them to summon security immediately. Mohana has more on how it works.
health
Food as medicine works, according to two new studies
The irony is not lost on Shane Bailey. The 72-year-old U.S. Coast Guard veteran calls Stockton, Calif., home, but her neighborhood is considered a food desert. "I live in the Central Valley with a lot of produce being grown. But in Stockton, it's often either very expensive, or low quality, or both," she said. Her health improved when she joined a pilot program called Food Rx, in which patients with diabetes received biweekly healthy meal kits, including fresh produce, for a year.
Two recent studies showed the power of produce prescription programs to improve diabetes-related health. Blood sugar levels got better, food insecurity dropped, and healthy behaviors increased, including physical activity. "We can provide medical care and dietary counseling, but when patients cannot afford to access healthy foods, they cannot follow advice on diet and nutrition," researcher Claudia Nau told STAT's Anika Nayak. Read more.
health care
More kids head to a hospital for asthma if their caregiver's preferred language is not English
A child's asthma is one of the top reasons families wind up seeking health care. It's also a condition that disproportionately affects families from historically marginalized groups, reflecting socioeconomic factors including access to care. A new study in Pediatrics looked at more than 14,000 children in Washington, D.C., to see if the preferred language their caregivers indicated on health records was a factor in unscheduled visits to Children's National Hospital.
For the 8% of caregivers who stated a non-English language preference, their children had higher odds of unscheduled asthma-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations. The higher odds of having an asthma-related hospitalization among Hispanic families held true after accounting for the child's age, ethnicity, insurance status, diagnosis of persistent asthma, drugs prescribed, and encounters with primary care. The researchers urge better understanding the "unique barriers that caregivers who speak languages other than English face in caring for their children with asthma."
On the latest episode of The First Opinion Podcast, First Opinion Editor Torie Bosch talks with medical student Amelia Mercado and her professor, J. Wesley Boyd, about the stressors of medical training, privacy concerns within academic institutions, and how high insurance costs affect access to mental health care. Listen here.
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