The proposal, which builds on Health + Hospitals’ existing Housing for Health initiative, was part of Mayor Eric Adams’ housing blueprint released in June 2022.
The finance committee of Health + Hospitals’ board of directors voted Monday to approve the contract, sending it to the full board for a vote later this month.
Health + Hospitals President and CEO Mitchell Katz said the initiative will borrow the “do what it takes” approach of the Los Angeles County Health Agency, where, as its former director, he launched a similar program that succeeded in housing more than 4,000 patients.
The key was to find a way to move a patient who had only a $1,200 rent subsidy into a $1,300 unit, instead of telling the person that no housing was available, Katz cited as an example.
“There were all of these people who were connected to housing case managers but didn’t have housing,” Katz said at the committee meeting Monday. “They would keep going to the same set of housing case managers, who’d say, ‘I’m sorry I don’t have any housing’, or, ‘You don’t have the right subsidy.’”
Health + Hospitals has permanently housed nearly 500 patients on its own through its Housing for Health initiative, but the time-consuming work falls on social workers who are often overburdened and lack specific housing expertise.
The process to house someone takes about nine months, Leora Jontef, the system’s assistant vice president of housing and real estate, said at the meeting.
“This is very staffing-intensive,” Jontef said.
Case in point: about 70 percent of the contract’s cost is staffing, she added.
However, Coordinated Behavioral Care’s projected caseload will still be small compared to the need. Health + Hospitals said its goal is to secure 400 housing placements per year among the 600 patients receiving services. The system, meanwhile, cared for nearly 50,000 homeless patients last year.
If its projected annual caseload is accurate, Health + Hospitals would be spending nearly $6,000 per patient over the potential four-year contract term. But officials said it would ultimately reduce emergency room and hospital utilization, pointing to research that links stable housing to better health outcomes.
On average, patients experiencing homelessness visit emergency rooms three times more often than patients who have housing and stay in the hospital three times as long, according to the health system.
Health + Hospitals cited an analysis it conducted of 54 patients housed by the Housing for Health program in the first half of 2021, which showed reductions in emergency department visits and the length of time someone was hospitalized in the year after they were placed in permanent housing.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Advanced Luminal GI workshop at Continental Hospitals in Hyderabad
Continental Hospitals conducted the Advanced Luminal GI Workshop on 11th March 2023, organized by the Department of Gastroenterology & Liver Diseases! The workshop provided the attendees with the opportunity to listen to luminaries such as Dr Guru N Reddy, Chief of Gastroenterology & Liver Diseases and Dr Chalapati Rao Achanta, Clinical Director Institute of Gastroenterology at KIMS ICON Hospital, Vishakapatanam.
The workshop focused on the advancements in the field of Small Bowel Endoscopy and how they are improving patient-care. Dr.Guru N Reddy delivered the keynote address with Dr. Chalapati Rao Achanta being the chief faculty, and Dr. Raghuram Konadala, Consultant for Gastroenterology at Continental Hospitals being the program director.
In his address, Dr. Guru N Reddy underlined the advances in the advent of the motorized enteroscopy had revolutionized small bowel imaging and made it possible to detect diseases that were frequently missed in the past. This helps improve treatment modalities, save costs for patients, and overall improve the quality of patient care.
The workshop was attended by residents, practitioners, and consultants from the field of gastroenterology. And it was followed by dry-model training and live case demonstrations.
Hyderabad: A local consumer court on February 22 ordered Sunshine Hospitals, a unit of Sarvejana Healthcare to pay a refund of Rs 8,73,943 for exorbitantly charging a Kulsumpura resident for COVID-19 treatment.
Qurratul Ayn Fatima, a forty-year-old housewife approached the district consumer disputes redressal commission, for a refund of Rs 14,38,000 claiming that the hospital overcharged for the COVID-19 treatment of her deceased husband Mohd Kalimuddin.
The district consumer disputes redressal commission, Hyderabad – 3, ruled in the favour of Qurratul Ayn Fatima and asked the Hospital to pay a refund of Rs 8,73,943 with interest along with Rs 10,000 as compensation for causing mental agony and trauma.
“There has never been an occasion for any negligence or deficiency in treatment rendered by the hospital,” the advocates for the hospital told the court.
“Now making absurd accusations against the hospital is uncalled for. The complainant is unreasonable and untenable and without any basis,” they added.
The court order said that according to G.O.Rt.No.248, the hospital has to refund a total of Rs 8,73,943 collected as lab charges, life-supporting charges, medical utility charges and food and beverages charges within 45 days from February 22.
According to the said GO private hospitals are allowed to collect Rs 4,000 per day towards charges for routine ward + isolation.
The charges for ICU without ventilator or isolation were prescribed Rs 7,500 and Rs 9,000 was prescribed towards charges for ICU with ventilator and tests/investigations.
No hospital can collect abnormal charges from the patients exploiting the unfortunate pandemic situation.
The court said, the High Court of Telangana slammed the state government on June 1, 2022 for failing to set a fee cap for private institutions treating COVID-19 patients in the state and observed that people have been mortgaging gold to pay bills.
The court recalled that the Chief Justice of Telangana had suggested that hospitals should be compelled to return the excessive fees or face having their licences revoked.
“The hospital has collected the amount from the complainant exorbitantly. This act clearly shows the deficiency in services on the part of the opposite parties,” observed the court.
New Delhi: The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) will partner with other government hospitals in the national capital for referral of patients to optimally utilise vacant beds in other hospitals, it was announced on Friday.
Lt Governor V.K. Saxena held a meeting with AIIMS Director Dr. M Srinivas, Chief Secretary Naresh Kumar and other officials to evolve a formal system for referral of patients. As the premier health organisation AIIMS always suffer acute shortage of beds, the pact will optimally utilise vacant beds in other government hospitals where critical but stable patients from AIIMS could be referred for further treatment.
The new system will also ensure that patients who require primary and secondary healthcare services go to the other hospitals and chronic and critically ill patients get specialied treatment at the AIIMS.
Under the pilot project, the Indira Gandhi Hospital in Dwarka and NDMC’s Charak Palika Hospital will be taken on-board and paired with the AIIMS starting next month.
The AIIMS will support these hospitals in terms of expertise and critical infrastructure and patients from the AIIMS could be referred to these hospitals in case of unavailability of beds. Gradually, other government hospitals and healthcare centres will be roped in and developed as ‘Partner Institutions’ of AIIMS, to cater to the local population in different localities of Delhi.
The aim is to develop super-specialty hospitals in different localities of the capital so that the burden on AIIMS could reduce and simultaneously people across the city could access healthcare near their homes at par with what they would have got at the AIIMS.
The LG has directed the Health Department to carry out a gap analysis of available beds in all its major hospitals within a week. It was also directed to develop a centralised dashboard where the availability of beds in all government hospitals in the city will be available on a real time basis.
The European Union regulates all sorts of banks: money banks, blood banks, sperm banks.
Its next target? Breast milk banks.
Brussels bureaucrats want to homogenize the rules overseeing the donation and use of donor breast milk across the bloc.
It’s part of the European Commission’s proposed revamp of the laws covering safety and quality standards for substances of human origin (SoHO) intended for human use. Currently, the laws cover blood, tissues and cells, but the EU wants to extend coverage to all SoHO — including donor breast milk.
While, at first glance, it might seem like the EU is trying to milk its regulatory powers, experts are largely in favor of the plan to set EU-wide standards, saying it will improve its availability and safety.
With lawmakers and EU countries debating the revamp, POLITICO walks you through the issue.
What are breast milk banks?
Women who make more breast milk than their babies need can donate it to a breast milk bank.
These banks screen donors and collect, process and distribute the milk to infants in need — those whose mother’s own milk is not available or sufficient.
While exclusive breastfeeding is recommended for all babies in the first six months of their life, it’s especially important for premature or sick newborns, experts say.
Among many other benefits, breast milk contains antibodies that are important for newborns’ immune systems. Babies born before 30 weeks of pregnancy are especially susceptible to infections, particularly from necrotizing enterocolitis, a type of gut inflammation that can be fatal. Their survival rates improve when they get human milk as compared with formula, said Elien Rouw, a breastfeeding medicine specialist in Germany and president-elect of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine.
There are currently 282 breast milk banks in Europe, including Turkey and Ukraine, according to the European Milk Bank Association.
Aren’t they already regulated?
Donor breast milk is regulated differently in different countries. For example, it’s considered a health product in France, a food in Germany, and is uncategorized and unregulated in Romania. And while the safety standards are set at the national level in France, for instance, they are setat the regional level in Belgium.
The Commission wants to harmonize breast milk safety standardsacross the EU | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
There is some level of convergence though. For example, most national guidelines in the world recommend donor breast milk should be pasteurized, according to the European Milk Bank Association.
In France, for example, the milk is first tested for bacteria and highly contaminated milk is thrown out, explains Jean-Charles Picaud, professor of pediatrics specialized in neonatology at Hôpital de la Croix-Rousse in Lyon, and president of the French Human Milk Bank Association. The rest is then pasteurized at precisely 62.5 degrees Celsius for exactly 30 minutes and then retested before being made available for babies.
What does the Commission want to do?
The Commission wants to harmonize safety standardsacross the EU, not only to ensure the safety of the babies that consume breast milk, but also to make it easier for donor breast milk — and other SoHO — to cross borders.
Donor milk banks are unevenly spread out across the Continent. There are over 30 in France, for example, but only four in Belgium and one in Romania.And parts of Europe are facing a shortage of donor breast milk, while it remains in limited supply elsewhere.
“There are children dying in Germany because they didn’t have, or didn’t have enough, human milk,”Rouw, the breastfeeding medicine specialist in Germany, said. Centers in Germany caring for extremely premature babies without direct access to a milk bank are buying it in part from Belgium and the United States, she added.
Experts agree that having harmonized safety standards would make the cross-border exchange of breast milk easier, improving babies’ access to it. These include things like donor selection criteria, maternal blood tests for infections, hygiene standards during collection, cold chain conditions during transport, and testing the milk for bacteria, said Picaud, president of the French Human Milk Bank Association.
However, while the Commission is setting out the principle of bloc-wide standards in its regulation, it aims to leave it to expert bodies — the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM) — to hammer out the precise scientific and technical details so that these can be more easily updated should the need arise.
Should donors get paid?
The debate over paying for substances of human origin is a divisive one. Germany’s Human Milk Bank Initiative, a nongovernmental organization that promotes nonprofit donor milk banks, warned in a position statement to the Commission in 2020that “ethically questionable approaches” have been used globally to acquire human milk from “lactating mothers in resource-limited regions or from socio-economically disadvantaged populations.”
EU countries take varying approaches when it comes to donor compensation for breast milk. Donors in France, for instance, receive no financial compensation. In Sweden, donating mothers receive a nominal 250 Swedish krona (€22.56) per liter of donated milk.
The Commission’s proposed revision includes guidance on compensation for all SoHO donors, to allow any financial losses to be covered — but leaves it to EU countries to determine whether to allow it and if so, the conditions for it, ensuring they remain “financially neutral.”
As well as human milk banks, the new law would also apply to any company looking to commercialize breast milk as an ingredient.
A nurse checks reserves of breast milk in the Sant’Anna hospital in Turin, Italy | Diana Bagnoli/Getty Images
Given the growing body of research showing the clinical benefits of donor breast milk for premature babies, hospital-affiliated milk banks around the world are expanding their activities — and there’s also growing commercial interest, a Commission spokesperson told POLITICO.
At least one company is using breast milk to make fortifiers for sick and premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, which are then added to either a mother’s milk or donor milk.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
MOSCOW — Every year, during the anniversary of the battle that turned back the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union, the city of Volgograd is briefly renamed Stalingrad, its Soviet-era name.
During this year’s commemoration, however, authorities went further. They unveiled a bust of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and paraded soldiers dressed as secret police in a bid to emphasize the parallels between Russia’s past and its present.
“It’s unbelievable but true: we are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin, who traveled to Volgograd to deliver a speech on February 2. “Again and again, we have to repel the aggression of the collective West.”
Putin’s statement was full of factual inaccuracies: Russia is fighting not the West but Ukraine, because it invaded the country; the German Leopards being delivered to Kyiv date back only to the 1960s; there’s no plan for them to enter Russian territory.
But the Russian president’s evocation of former victories was telling — it was a distillation of his approach to justifying an invasion that hasn’t gone to plan. These days in Russia, if the present is hard to explain, appeal to the past.
“The language of history has replaced the language of politics,” said Ivan Kurilla, a historian at the European University at St. Petersburg. “It is used to explain what is happening in a simple way that Russians understand.”
Putin has long harkened back to World War II — known in the country as The Great Patriotic War, in which more than 20 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have died.
Invoking the fight against Adolf Hitler simultaneously taps into Russian trauma and frames the country as being on the right side of history. “It has been turned into a master narrative through which [Putin] communicates the basic ideas of what is good and bad; who is friend and who foe,” said Kurilla.
Putin’s announcement of his full-scale assault on Ukraine was no exception. On February 24, 2022, Russians awoke to a televised speech announcing the start of “a special military operation” to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine.
“The official narrative was: ‘there are fascists in Ukraine, and we want to help people there. We are fighting for the sake of a great cause,’” said Tamara Eidelman, an expert in Russian propaganda.
On the streets, however, Russians seemed confused.
Asked in the early days of the war what “denazification” meant by the Russian website 7×7, one man suggested: “Respect for people of different ethnicities, respect for different languages, equality before the law and freedom of the press.”
Russia’s laws punish those seen as discrediting the Russian Armed Forces or spreading fake news by using the word “war” | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
Another interviewee ventured a different definition: “Destroy everyone who is not for a normal, peaceful life.”
The term “special military operation” at least was somewhat clearer. It suggested a speedy, professional, targeted offensive.
“There is a certain mundaneness to it — ‘yes, this is going to be unpleasant, but we’ll take care of it quickly,’” said Eidelman, the propaganda expert.
А week after the invasion, Russia’s laws were amended to punish those seen as discrediting the Russian armed forces or spreading fake news, including by using the word “war.”
Historical parallels
As the special military operation turned into a protracted conflict, and the facts on the ground refused to bend to Putin’s narrative, the Kremlin has gradually been forced to change its story.
Images of a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol or corpses littering the streets of Bucha were dismissed by state propaganda as fake or a provocation — and yet by spring the terms “demilitarization” and “denazification” had practically disappeared from the public sphere.
New justifications for the invasion were inserted into speeches and broadcasts, such as a claim that the United States had been developing biological weapons in Ukraine. In October, Putin declared that one of the main goals of the war had been to provide Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, with a stable water supply.
But the appeal to history has remained central to Putin’s communication effort.
While World War II remains his favorite leitmotif, the Russian president has been expansive in his historical comparisons. In June, he referenced Peter the Great’s campaign to “return what was Russia’s.” And during an October ceremony to lay claim to four regions in Ukraine, it was Catherine the Great who got a mention.
“Every so many months, another story is put forward as if they’re studying the reaction, looking to see what resonates,” said Kurilla.
The search for historical parallels has also bubbled up from below, as even supporters of the war search for justification. “Especially in spring and early summer, there was an attempt to Sovietize the war, with people waving red flags, trying to make sense of it through that lens.”
In the city of Syzran, students were filmed late last year pushing dummy tanks around in a sports hall in a re-enactment of the World War II Battle of Kursk. More recently, law students in St. Petersburg took part in a supposed restaging of the Nuremberg trials, which the region’s governor praised as “timely” in light of Russia’s current struggle against Nazism.
More recent statement by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin himself have made the idea of “war” less taboo | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Throughout, the Kremlin has sought to depict the conflict as a battle against powerful Western interests bent on using Ukraine to undermine Russia — a narrative that has become increasingly important as the Kremlin demands bigger sacrifices from the Russian population, most notably with a mobilization campaign in September.
“Long before February last year, people were already telling us: We are being dragged into a war by the West which we don’t want but there is no retreating from,” said Denis Volkov, director of the independent pollster Levada Center.
The sentiment, he added, has been widespread since the nineties, fed by disappointment over Russia’s diminished standing after the Cold War. “What we observe today is the culmination of that feeling of resentment, of unrealized illusions, especially among those over 50,” he said.
Long haul
With the war approaching the one-year mark, the narrative is once again having to adapt.
Even as hundreds in Russia are being prosecuted under wartime censorship laws, slips of the tongue by top officials such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and even Putin himself in December have made the idea of “war” less taboo.
“We are moving away from a special military operation towards a holy war … against 50 countries united by Satanism,” the veteran propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said on his program in January.
According to Levada, Russians are now expecting the war to last another six months or longer. “The majority keep to the sidelines, and passively support the war, as long as it doesn’t affect them directly,” said Volkov, the pollster.
Meanwhile, reports of Western weapons deliveries have been used to reinforce the argument that Russia is battling the West under the umbrella of NATO — no longer in an ideological sense, but in a literal one.
“A year of war has changed not the words that are said themselves but what they stand for in real life,” said Kurilla, the historian. “What started out as a historic metaphor is being fueled by actual spilled blood.”
In newspaper stands, Russians will find magazines such as “The Historian,” full of detailed spreads arguing that the Soviet Union’s Western allies in World War II were, in fact, Nazi sympathizers all along — another recycled trope from Russian history.
“During the Cold War, you would find caricatures depicting Western leaders such as President Eisenhower in fascist dress and a NATO helmet,” said Eidelman, the expert in Russian propaganda.
“This level of hatred and aggressive nationalism has not been seen since the late Stalin period,” she added.
The anti-West sentiment in Russia has been fed by disappointment over the country’s diminished standing after the Cold War | Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
On Tuesday, three days before the one-year anniversary of the invasion, Putin is scheduled to give another speech. He is expected to distract from Russia’s failure to capture any new large settlements in Ukraine by rehearsing old themes such as his gripes with the West and Russia’s past and present heroism.
There may be a limit, however, to how much the Russian president can infuse his subjects with enthusiasm for his country’s past glories.
In Volgograd, proposals to have the city permanently renamed to Stalingrad have been unsuccessful, with polls showing a large majority of the population is against such an initiative.
When it comes to embracing the past, Russians are still one step behind their leaders.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
SRINAGAR: J&K state health agency (SHA) has suspended the empanelment of 13 hospitals and imposed heavy penalties on 17 others for their involvement in fraud while implementing the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY).
Quoting officials news agency IANS reported that over Rs 1.77 crore have been imposed as a penalty on the hospitals involved in fraudulent activities in 2022 out of which over Rs 1.34 crore have been recovered so far by the SHA.
As per official sources, the hospitals which have faced the action include Ibn Sina Hospital, Rs 24 lakh penalty imposed and empanelment suspended; Quality Care Hospital, Rs 6.64 lakh penalty imposed; Narayana Hospital, Rs 54.62 lakh penalty imposed; Ess Bee Hospital, empanelment suspended; Waseem Memorial Hospital, empanelment suspended.
In addition, Florence Hospital in Chanapora (Srinagar), Rs 5 lakh penalty imposed; Shadab hospital, Rs 22 lakh penalty imposed; Mohammadiya hospital, Rs 6 lakh penalty imposed; Kidney hospital in Sonwar (Srinagar), Rs 18.72 lakh penalty imposed. This hospital also faced suspension of its empanelment in February last year.
KD Eye Clinic Hospital, Rs 1 lakh penalty and suspension of empanelment; ASCOMS in Jammu, Rs 2.66 lakh penalty; while Al-Noor Hospital, Midcity Hospital and South City Nursing Home faced the suspension of their empanelment in September last year.
Centre for Eye care hospital, Rs 1.64 penalty and suspension of empanelment in December last year. Noora Hospital in Srinagar, Rs 5.54 lakh penalty imposed; Baba Nayak Hospital, Rs 69,000 penalty; Raksha Kidney Hospital, Rs 20 lakh penalty; and National Hospital Jammu, empanelment suspended.
Srinagar, Feb 21: In order to check fraud and implement SEHAT scheme effectively in Jammu and Kashmir, Government has initiated action against the 25 erring hospitals so far.
Reports said that the State Anti-Fraud Unit (SAFU) is closely monitoring the activities of all such hospitals.
The main aim behind the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY) SEHAT scheme is to extend health insurance coverage to all residents of Jammu and Kashmir. It provides free-of-cost insurance cover to all the natives of the erstwhile state.
Sources told news agency Kashmir News Trust that the government had directed both Directors Health Services Kashmir and Jammu to keep a vigil on different laboratories working under their jurisdiction and see if they comply with the guidelines under the scheme.
These directions have been passed in a bid to stop fraud and wrongdoings.
The government has decided to de-empanelment and blacklist hospitals if they indulge in fraudulent activities under this scheme.
Health and Medical Education Department has claimed that it has already released Rs 430 crore in favor of the hospitals so that patients get treatment under this scheme. [KNT]
The powerful earthquakes that struck central Turkey and northwest Syria just over a week ago are the “worst natural disaster in the WHO European Region for a century,” said Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe.
“We are still learning about its magnitude. Its true cost is not known yet,” Kluge said during a press briefing today.
The WHO’s European Region includes 53 European and Central Asian countries, including Turkey.
More than 31,000 people are confirmed dead in Turkey, and nearly 5,000 lost their lives across the border in Syria, he said, adding that the figures are expected to rise further. He added that 26 million people across both countries are in need of humanitarian assistance.
The WHO launched a $43 million appeal to support the earthquake response, with likely more to come.
“I expect this to at least double over the coming days as we get a better assessment of the massive scale of this crisis and the needs,” Kluge said.
With water and sanitation facilities being hit, concerns are mounting over health issues, including thespread of infectious diseases. Health care facilities have also been gravely damaged.
“According to the Turkish authorities, an estimated 80,000 people are in hospital, placing a huge strain on the health system, itself badly damaged by the disaster,” Kluge said.
“We have initiated the largest deployment of Emergency Medical Teams in the WHO European Region in our 75-year history,”he added. Their goal is to support the damaged medical facilities, focusing on the high number of trauma patients and those with catastrophic injuries.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Telangana Health and Finance Minister Harish Rao. (Photo: IANS)
Hyderabad: State Medical & Health Minister T. Harish Rao has said Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao launched basthi hospitals in the State in order to offer quality healthcare services to people in all the basthis of the State. He said the hospitals were offering excellent healthcare services to the people and acquired the name.
Replying to questions raised by the members in the House, the Health Minister said they had conducted lipid profile test which costs ₹800 in private hospitals to 1.48 lakh people free of cost. He also said they had also conducted thyroid test to 1.08 lakh people at the Basthi hospitals.
Harish Rao said they were giving holiday to the Basthi hospitals on Saturdays instead of Sunday. He also said they were providing 158 types of medicines free of cost to patients. He also said the services being offered by the Basthi hospitals had led to the drop in the number of OP cases in the major government hospitals. He said the total number of OP patients in Osmania general hospital in 2019 was 12 lakh and the number had come down to five lakh in 2022. He also said the total number of OP patients in Gandhi Hospital had come down to 3.7 lakh in 2022 from 6.5 lakh in 2019.
Similarly, total number of the patients in Nilofer hospital had come down to 5.3 lakh. He said the total number of the patients in Fever hospital had come down to 1.12 lakh in the year 2022 from four lakh in 2019. He said the major hospitals of the State are now focusing on performing major and critical surgeries due to the reduction in their OP number. The Health Minister said a total of one crore people had availed the services of the Basthi hospitals so far. He also said they would soon launch biometric attendance system in all Basthi hospitals. They would also supply nutrition kits in all the districts from April this year.
