Telehealth is booming like never before, and many patients and health care providers across the U.S. are using it for the first time.
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Telehealth has seen massive increases in use since the pandemic started. When done right, remote health care can be just as effective as in-person medicine.
“Frankly, why should any hospital purchase coal-fired energy when it produces toxic air pollution that harms health?”
Canada’s Indigenous leaders are concerned that the federal government’s promised support to help First Nations, Inuit and Métis people deal with the impacts of COVID-19 may not be sufficient. Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde, second from right, makes the point during a news conference in Ottawa with First Nations leaders.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Anne Levesque, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa and Sophie Thériault, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Measures to control the spread of COVID-19 within Indigenous communities represent less than one per cent of Canada’s funding to limit the impacts of the virus.
Masks: Where health care and fashion collide.
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A transparency index could fix issues in the current medical supply chain in the US.
A patient is connected to an oxygen tank at the Afghan-Japan Communicable Disease Hospital for COVID-19 patients in Kabul, Afghanistan, in June 2020. Afghan media has reported that COVID-19 patients are dying in government hospitals due to shortages of medical oxygen.
(AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
Decades of armed conflict in Afghanistan has destroyed health-care infrastructure and the reconstruction efforts have failed to provide accessible healthcare, exacerbating the COVID-19 crisis.
Given the current health crisis, seniors are highly vulnerable, yet can face significant costs for health care.
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Thomas Barnay, Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne (UPEC)
Despite significant differences in their systems, both countries share the challenge of having to reduce the cost of health and long-term care for older citizens.
A pharmacy store in Ogun State, southwest Nigeria.
Photo by Pius Utomi Ekpei /AFP via Getty Images
For many reasons, drug users are shifting from the use of conventional psychoactive drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin to pharmaceutical drugs for non-medical purposes.
Demands on nurses for such things as electronic record keeping take time away from patients. They can also lead to resource deprivation trauma.
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COVID-19 is traumatizing nurses. Yet nurses have suffered trauma for decades, often due to insufficient resources, and changes within the field have been slow.
During the pandemic, hospital areas designated for COVID-19 patients are called ‘hot zones.’
(Hannah Kirkham)
The only chaplain in the COVID-19 section of a Montréal hospital offers spiritual care to patients and families, as well to staff, who have found themselves more intimately exposed to life and death.
Since March, when Medicare-funded phone and video consultations with doctors and other health workers were made available to all Australians, millions of appointments have been delivered remotely.
A resident and a worker watch as 150 nursing union members show support at Orchard Villa Long-Term Care in Pickering, Ont., on Monday June 1, 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
Many white health students - our future doctors, nurses and health workers - find learning about the ongoing health impacts of colonisation on Indigenous Australians confronting. But it’s vital.
Touch is central to empathy because the person being touched is also touching back.
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A give-and-take between patient and provider is essential to patient care. As the COVID-19 pandemic ushers in a new era of medicine, one doctor wonders if this connection will be lost.
At least 21 states have taken actions within the last four months to limit the liability of health care providers related to the coronavirus.
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Nearly half the states have reduced liability for health care providers at a time when nursing home regulation is declining and families can’t visit loved ones for fear of spreading the coronavirus.
A growing number of Americans are feeling financial stress and unable to afford basics like food and health care.
AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
David Salkever, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
A third of Americans experiencing significant financial stress say they wouldn’t contact a doctor if they experienced coronavirus symptoms.
Pairing widespread testing with fast, effective contact tracing is considered essential for controlling the coronavirus’s spread as the U.S. passes 100,000 deaths.
AP Images/Rick Bowmer
Since the state’s first coronavirus case surfaced, trained case investigators have traced the contacts of every person who tested positive. Here’s what else South Carolina got right.
Caring for loved ones is harder during the coronavirus pandemic.
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Erin E. Kent, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The United States has 53 million caregivers, according to the latest estimate. And COVID-19 makes what they do much harder.
Emergency rooms across the country have seen sharp drops in the number of patients seeking care for problems other than COVID-19.
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Delaying medical care comes at a cost, both human and financial. The patients some emergency rooms have been seeing are a lot sicker and more likely to need hospitalization.
Many nurses lack paid sick leave.
AP Photo/Michael Dwyer
American workers tend to lack many basic benefits that are incredibly common in other countries, a situation the ‘Essential Worker Bill of Rights’ aims to remedy.
A nurse puts on personal protective equipment before entering a patient’s room in a COVID-19 intensive care unit.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward
In Ontario, the task of deciding which treatments to use for COVID-19 patients falls to two committees that weigh the evidence and choose which drugs to use, and how to manage critical illness.
Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne
Professor (adjunct) and Senior Fellow, Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto