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Black hospitals vanished in the U.S. decades ago. Some communities have paid a price
Lauren Sausser, NPR, Aug. 10
The future of the old Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi is still unknown, more than 40 years after its closing. It opened in 1942 and was staffed by Black doctors and nurses that exclusively admitted Black patients, during a time when Jim Crow laws barred them from accessing the same health care facilities as white patients. Historians said this hospital, and hundreds of others like it, were lost as a result of social progress. Today, there is a need for more health care options in that community, which is among the poorest in the nation and where life expectancy is a decade shorter than the national average.
What killed Harmony Ball-Stribling?
Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times, Aug. 11
Harmony Ball-Stribling was eight months pregnant and scheduled to have a c-section five days later when she started to feel sick. Her husband had started the 30-mile drive to the nearest hospital in Yazoo City, Mississippi, when she died on the way there from complications of preeclampsia. But another factor was that she was a Black woman in America, where pregnant women of color die at almost three times the rate of white women. “It’s not race itself that has an impact,” said Maria B. Ospina, a clinical epidemiologist and associate professor. “I cannot emphasize that enough. It is the experiences of racism and segregation that have affected every single aspect of African American women’s lives.”
The fight against DEI programs shifts to medical care
Theo Francis and Melanie Evans, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 14
The Cleveland Clinic is being accused of illegally discriminating on the basis of race for operating a program to prevent and treat strokes and other conditions among minority patients. The programs in question are stroke prevention and men’s health programs aimed at improving outcomes for Black and Latino patients. The groups accusing Cleveland Clinic of discrimination have sued over other kinds of diversity initiatives. “There’s definitely a concerted effort to attack DEI in healthcare and medicine, but I haven’t seen it done before over the way the actual provision of medical care is done,” said David Glasgow, executive director of New York University School of Law’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging.
CT universities embrace holistic care as a way to teach the new generation of health care workers
Cris Villalonga-Vivoni, The Record Journal, Aug. 12
More nursing schools in Connecticut are taking a holistic approach to not only teach students self-care, but also to improve patient-provider relationships once they graduate. A holistic approach addresses a patient’s physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. It can also look at outside factors and social determinants of health, in order to improve patients’ overall care. “If someone’s homeless, or if someone can’t afford their medication, or just lost a job, we can’t reasonably send those people home with the same expectations as somebody who has a job and transportation and a means to do follow-up care and things like that,” said Jennifer Arsan-Siemasko, assistant clinical nursing professor at Sacred Heart University.
Black people, women in general less likely to survive after CPR for cardiac arrest
Eduardo Cuevas, USA Today, Aug. 9
CPR can help improve a person’s odds of survival after experiencing cardiac arrest. However, a new study found that white people were three times more likely than Black people to survive, and men of any background were twice as likely to survive as women. The causes for these differences were not clear. The study has prompted researchers to ask questions about potential reasons behind these findings, including the quality of training people receive and whether 911 dispatcher instructions to bystanders varied in different communities.