hospitals
Medicare threatens to pull funding from HCA's embattled Mission Hospital
Mike Belleme for STAT
After a Medicare inspection revealed that patient safety is in "immediate jeopardy," the agency has threatened to stop paying a North Carolina hospital for services provided to seniors. Mission Hospital in Asheville has a few weeks to repair problems that resulted in Medicare's most severe designation. "It's a death threat," said Michael Millenson, a national patient safety expert and president of the consultancy Health Quality Advisors, because Medicare could account for one-third of hospital revenue.
Medicare's warning and the findings that led to it, first reported by local news outlet the Asheville Watchdog, follow a 2023 STAT investigation by Tara Bannow that detailed problems at Mission and other HCA-owned hospitals. Current and former clinicians told STAT last fall their colleagues have left in droves since HCA bought six-hospital Mission Health in 2019. In December, North Carolina's attorney general sued HCA for failing to provide the emergency and cancer care it had promised to keep intact. Tara has more.
mental health
Gun-violence exposure tied to suicide in Black adults
Black people are exposed to disproportionately more gun violence than white people. Suicide rates are rising among Black people. A new study in JAMA Network Open connects those two trends. For their analysis, the researchers surveyed just over 3,000 Black adults last year, asking if they'd ever been shot, threatened with a gun, knew someone who had been shot, or witnessed or heard about a shooting. More than half were exposed to at least one form of gun violence, and 12% to three types.
Suicidal thoughts and gun exposure lined up this way:
- Being threatened or knowing someone who'd been shot was associated with lifetime suicidal ideation.
- Being shot was associated with planning a suicide.
- Being threatened or knowing someone who'd been shot was associated with lifetime suicide attempts
"The disproportionate burden of [gun violence exposure] borne by Black communities and exacerbated by numerous structural inequities may represent an even more substantial injustice than previously understood," the authors conclude.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. For TTY users: Use your preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988.
adolescent health
1 in 5 adolescents report mental health problems
About 1 in 5 young people say they are feeling anxiety or depression, a KFF analysis based on a new federal survey of teen health says. Released yesterday, the responses from adolescents 12 to 17 years old show some differences: Females were more than twice as likely as males to report anxiety and depression, and among LGBT+ adolescents, 43% said they had symptoms of anxiety and 37% said they felt symptoms of depression.
In other alarming trends, overdose deaths more than doubled from 253 in 2018 to 722 in 2022, likely caused by the synthetic opioid fentanyl entering the illicit drug supply. Other negative experiences noted in the survey: bullying (34%), emotional abuse by a parent (17%), and neighborhood violence (15%). Some adolescents are receiving mental health services, but some aren't, blocked by cost, fear of stigma, or not know how to get help.
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