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HealthCetera

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I had a lot of pre-conceived notions about poverty and people living in poverty.

These ideas are challenged daily this summer as an intern working at LIFT, a national non-profit whose mission is to help community members achieve economic stability and well-being.

After a comprehensive training orientation with skilled teachers, I have the opportunity to work one-on one with clients in LIFT’s Bronx office to secure housing, employment, public benefits, legal services and financial advising.

In 5 short weeks this experience has educated me and raised my awareness about people living in poverty. The people who come to LIFT as clients are not at all lazy. They work hard every day and come to LIFT because they just need help getting back on their feet.

Having lived through the recession, I think we can all relate to changes in economic security – some folks clearly impacted greater than others – but we all shared common feelings of anxiety, nervousness and panic.

HealthCetera

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Amanda Anderson is a Graduate Fellow at CHMP

Amanda Anderson 2

There’s a closet in my apartment that I generally tend to avoid. Besides housing my winter coats, it’s where I hide my toolbox and vacuum cleaner. Dark and crowded, every time I venture into it for my hammer, I become instantly angry at the chaos. It’d be easy enough to organize and light, but who wants to do that? Instead, I curse audibly when forced to enter, and all other times avoid it.

While reading about Nelson Mandela’s current clinical status and lack of documented end of life planning, I couldn’t help but think of my disorganized, but highly necessary storage space.

Death is a topic that plagues every living thing, but our society has decided it is worth talking about only when the occasion arises or is near. Hence, we are left, or leave our loved ones, to make decisions that we likely never spoke of in our healthy life. Cramped and disorganized, we’re forced to piece together parts of the puzzle of illness care in the dark; would mom want to live on a ventilator, would dad be okay with a feeding tube, would I want to persist as a vegetable?

Health, Media Engagement

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This is reposted from HEALTHpopuli, the blog of Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, a health economist and management consultant. Her company, THINK-Health is a strategic health consultancy that serves clients at the intersection of health and technology in the U.S. and Europe.

…and I’m not talking about here (or ).

Most people (75%) still view phone calls as the communication mode that best bolsters their relationships compared with texting (66%), picture messaging (35%), sharing on social networks (31%), emailing (25%), , and video chatting (9%). U.S. Cellular, the mobile phone company, surveyed 527 customers in April 2013 to learn about how wireless communication can bring “Better Moments” to peoples’ lives. In particular, people say that mobile phones help them:

Health, HealthCetera, Policy

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Ruth Lubic, CNM

Ruth Lubic, CNM

On July 1, the New York Times published an article by Elisabeth Rosenthal titled, American Way of Birth, Costliest in the World. What the title ignores is that the American way of birth also produces poorer outcomes for mother and baby.

We have overwhelming evidence that childbirthing centers SHOULD be the frontline for maternity care. These centers are usually managed and staffed by nurse midwives and use a midwifery–not an obstetrical–model of care. This model views birth as a life transition; the midwife doesn’t ‘deliver’ the baby but assists the woman in birthing her baby.

While some may argue that this is just a matter of semantics, the language of health care providers ‘delivering’ babies has led to views of the mother as passive participants who are not in control of this powerful event. My mother told me that, for my own birth in the mid-1900s, she was told to cross her legs until the obstetrician could arrive from the golf course and then she was given a general anesthesia and didn’t see me for 24 hours. Some women were restrained, given IVs, and were confined to a bed. No eating or drinking until after the delivery.

Health, Policy

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This guest post is written by Ashly E Jordan, a DPH Candidate at the City University of New York.

Ashley JordanIt was a relatively small abscess at the base of Angel’s wrist. Angel lived in an abandoned building in Southwest Detroit. Angel was a long-term drug user.  Angel was a citizen, but had little schooling and was predominately non-English speaking. She was born in and grew up in Chicago. Angel came to the syringe exchange program where I was working, and presented with the abscess. We referred her to the nearest clinic, which in this impoverished neighborhood was almost an hour’s walk. Such abscesses are common in drug injectors and can generally be treated easily and inexpensively as an outpatient.  Angel did not have a car, and did not have bus fare. She did walk to the clinic, only to be turned away. While Angel had Illinois Medicaid, the clinic would not see her because they saw patients only with Michigan Medicaid. She had previous bad experiences with perceived discrimination and stigmatization in other care settings, and being turned away felt normal. She did not know she had other options. Angel was soon admitted to the hospital and was found to have an infection that had spread to her blood (she had “sepsis”). She required a month long hospitalization, and two surgeries on her arm before she was eventually released alive but with enormous permanent scars on her arm. Angel had health insurance and would be considered by many to have “health care access,” however due to multi-level barriers including stigmatization, lack of transportation, arcane insurance restrictions and regulations, to her own learned fatalism, Angel’s inexpensively and easily treatable abscess came to require a month-long hospital stay with both worse clinical outcomes and vastly greater societal expense.

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