Photo by Laura James via Pexels
Nurses are pushing to limit the number of patients that can be assigned to a single person — a move that advocates say will make care safer and improve working conditions.
The American Nurses Association, which officially threw its support behind minimum nurse-to-patient ratio mandates in 2022, tracked nurse staffing bills in 21 states this year, many involving ratios. Federal ratio legislation was also introduced.
Ilana Yurkiewicz, M.D.
It’s a cliché to say that American health care is broken. Ilana Yurkiewicz, M.D., a Stanford University oncologist and internal medicine physician, says journalists should be more specific. The central problem, she argues, is that health care is fragmented.
“Fragmented” is the title of a new book in which Yurkiewicz, who’s written about medicine for such publications as Undark and Hematology News, describes barriers that prevent physicians from seeing a patient’s full medical narrative.
Health systems can’t easily share records. Electronic health records bury information. Payment systems de-prioritize follow-up. Grueling 28-hour shifts for medical residents discourage accountability. Primary care is underfunded. Sub-specialization is emphasized at the expense of holistic care.
From left to right: Ben Harder of U.S. News & World Report; Missy Danforth of Leapfrog; and Thomas Tsai, M.D., M.P.H., of Harvard Medical School
For decades, same-day procedures such as joint replacements and colonoscopies have outnumbered inpatient surgeries, yet only recently have consumers had data on the quality and safety of facilities that do them.
Screenshots of news headlines captured July 27, 2023. Graphic by Kevin Ridder
Too often, we journalists set aside our critical reasoning skills when it comes to alarming statistics about patient safety.
Hardeep Singh, M.D., M.P.H.
In 2015, major U.S. news organizations flocked to cover a seminal report by the Institute of Medicine that described the widespread harms from missed and delayed diagnoses.
But since that burst of attention, health care providers have done little to address the problem, according to leading researchers in the field who spoke at a conference in the Netherlands this month.
“I think every country is struggling with this,” Laura Zwaan, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Institute of Medical Education Research at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, said in an interview.