IowaWatch (https://www.iowawatch.org/tag/medicine/)
Editor’s Note: This story was updated Dec. 9, 2021, to include news that Darcy Havel-Sturdevant contracted COVID-19 again. The migraines, exhaustion and shortness of breath have existed dating to before Darcy Havel-Sturdevant was diagnosed with COVID-19 in April 2020. The shortness of breath has improved a bit but the rest remaine going into the Christmas holiday season. So do dizziness and confusion.
Despite all of the reporting, public announcements and warnings from health care professionals, community leaders and elected officials, health care workers IowaWatch spoke with as 2020 drew to a close said many people still don’t understand the severity of suffering that the people hit hardest with COVID-19 have to endure. Unless, that it, they have seen it up close, themselves, with someone they know.
Although it’s been around since at least the mid-1990s, telehealth has been slow to catch on before this spring, said Mei Kwong, executive director for the Center for Connected Health Policy. Before COVID, only 19 states’ Medicaid programs covered remote patient visits originating from the home, according to the center’s most recent 50-state survey. Fewer than half covered remote patient monitoring and only 16 reimbursed for store-and-forward care. FIND STATE-BY-STATE PRE-COVID POLICIES
Since March, there have been a flurry of changes to federal and state policies regulating virtual consultations as governors, legislators and insurance commissioners rushed to remove barriers to telehealth. Common changes temporarily expanded the types of providers, services, technologies and locations of telehealth visits covered by state Medicaid rules and eased licensing rules for out-of-state providers during the public health emergency.
Iowa hospital representatives are not surprised by an American College of Emergency Physicians survey revealing that nearly 50 percent of emergency physicians have been physically assaulted on the job. An IowaWatch supplement to a FairWarning story.
Slaps, kicks, bites and curses are daily hazards faced by staff in hundreds of emergency rooms. And the threat of workplace violence seems to be getting worse.
The increasing use in the health care arena of trauma-informed care in treating victims of child abuse and other trauma is rooted in the war experiences of battled-scared veterans of the Vietnam War.
How an Iowa woman’s father influenced her desire to be a doctor in the 1800s, and the name she made for herself.