Healthstyles Radio: Liz Seegert reports on Health Leads in NY
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Health Care Decision Day
April 16th is Health Care Decision Day. It’s an opportunity to jump start those conversations about end of life preferences–or advance directives–that you’ve postponed. At Hunter College, the Hunter Student Nurses Association, the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, and the Center for Health, Media & Policy at Hunter College are sponsoring an information table at the Brookdale Campus on 25th Street and 1st Avenue on April 16th from 1:00 to 8:00, and on the Main Campus at 68th and Lexington on April 17th from noon to 6:00. The undergraduate nursing students, in addition to helping to plan the two days, will staff the tables and help people to make sense of the various forms that will be available. (The photo above was taken at a similar event that the students did earlier in the academic season at the Main Campus.)
Of course, people will be encouraged to first talk with their loved ones about their preferences for end-of-life care and what’s important to them. The forms can be completed when having these conversations and then mailed into the New York Legal Assistance Group for registering them on a secure online storage service to enable health care providers anywhere to respect and honor your health care wishes. This service is available thanks to Tina Janssen-Spinosa, JD, of the NYLAG. Or people can simply make copies and give them to their health care providers, though the online repository ensures that new providers also know your wishes.
I wrote a commentary in the American Journal of Nursing about the need for health care professionals–nurses, in particular–to lead the public conversations about the importance of these “advance directives” and received an email from Jerry Soucy, RN, BSN, CSS, CHPN, Staff Educator at the VNA Care Network and Hospice in Southborough, MA. He shared a blog post from the local chapter of the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association about MOLST–Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment–another opportunity to have patients wishes be visible to health care providers no matter where they are moved in a hospital. The post emphasizes that Susan Block’s four questions to guide end-of-life conversations are probably more important than any form:
Cartoonist Jen Sorensen's response to North Dakota's "New Abortion Laws"
[caption id="attachment_6051" align="aligncenter" width="720"] Cartoonist Jen SorensonNew
Cartoonist Jen Sorensen’s response to North Dakota’s “New Abortion Laws”
[caption id="attachment_6051" align="aligncenter" width="720"] Cartoonist Jen SorensonNew
What's Missing from the Conversations about Nurse Practitioners and Primary Care?
[caption id="attachment_6044" align="aligncenter" width="480"] Source: Vanderbilt University
What’s Missing from the Conversations about Nurse Practitioners and Primary Care?
[caption id="attachment_6044" align="aligncenter" width="480"] Source: Vanderbilt University
Health professional groups voice support for marriage equality
Source: www.MaddowBlog.msnbc.com
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two cases on marriage equality. Hollingsworth v. Perry is a challenge to California’s Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to prohibit recognition of same-sex marriage. U.S. v. Windsor challenges Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a federal law declaring that “‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” The law thus bars same-sex couples, even those who are married in states that recognize their union, from rights or benefits available to other married couples. Lower courts in both cases ruled against these laws as violations of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection under the 5th Amendment (DOMA) and the 14th Amendment (Proposition 8).
Public sentiment on marriage equality has evolved rapidly in recent years. In a March ABC-Washington Post poll 58% responded that it should be legal for same-sex couples to marry. (A 2003 ABC-Post poll found support for same-sex marriage among only 37% of respondents). Especially among younger Americans, support for marriage equality is consistently strong, reaching across racial, ethnic, party and religious lines.
Dire predictions about the consequences of allowing same-sex marriage have , not surprisingly, simply not been borne out in those states (or the growing list of countries) that currently recognize it. Many people who previously opposed same-sex marriage have shifted their opinions, in some cases because their concerns for sons, daughters, other loved ones or close friends who themselves are Lesbians or gay men has made the issue more personally compelling for them. The recent announcement by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) that he now supports marriage equality is one example. Other prominent political figures have declared their support as well, citing marriage equality as a matter of fairness, including President Obama as well as both Hillary and Bill Clinton (who, as President, had signed DOMA into law in 1996). Over 100 prominent Republicans signed on to an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief filed by Ken Mehlman, a former Chair of the Republican National Committee and George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign manager, supporting marriage equality.
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I Dream a Borough Free From Hunger
CHMP Senior Fellow Charmaine Ruddock, MS directs Bronx Health REACH, a coalition of 50 community and faith-based organizations, funded by the Centers for Disease Control’s REACH 2010 Initiative to address racial and ethnic health disparities.
So now, the Bronx, in addition to having the designation as the poorest urban congressional district in the United States (approximately, 40% of residents live below the federal poverty level), has the additional, unfortunate, designation of being the hungriest neighborhood in the country.
Here is the irony; we also have one of the highest rates of obesity. For children – 1 out of 3 in the borough’s Head Start program is obese, and nearly 4 in 10 in public elementary schools are overweight or obese. For adults – 1 in 4 adults is obese, and 2 in 3 are overweight or obese.
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This seeming paradox of being the hungriest as well as the most overweight and obese actually reflects two sides of the same problem. Poor people with very limited resources also have access to the worst nutritional quality of food. What they can afford limits their food choices to those that are calorie dense but nutritionally poor. However, this represents a potential market for the cheap food industry, thus it should come as no surprise that there has been a large influx of fast food restaurants in the Bronx. And, if you read The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food in the New York Times Magazine you were made even further aware of the enormous odds that the poor and hungry face in trying to feed themselves and their families.
A New Prescription for Health?
Tucked inside the pediatric clinic at Nassau University Medical Center (NUMC) in East Meadow, NY, is the help desk of Health Leads, a new program staffed by enthusiastic and committed students from Hofstra University.
These young advocates fill “prescriptions” for food, utilities, transportation, and other services for local families in need.
The program addresses non-medical needs of families that may affect their health and wellness, such as living environments, access to nutritious food, or child care. Clinicians learn about these needs through questionnaires that patients fill out at each visit. They then “prescribe” items like food, or electricity to run home health equipment just as they would prescribe an inhaler for asthma or antibiotic for an infection.
This is a first-of -its-kind program in Nassau County and could serve as a care model for other large suburban locales.
With support from a professional case manager, trained students connect families with appropriate resources and help them with applications, navigate red tape, and ensure needs are actually met. The students essentially act as case workers, helping families determine what services they are eligible for and how to traverse the often-confusing process of applying for aid or special programs.
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