f the care quality received at safety-net hospitals — which provide care for the majority of uninsured and other vulnerable populations — found that quality at these facilities is similar to non-safety-net hospitals. This is despite the unique financial challenges at safety-net hospitals in the face of rising costs and the potential impact of the health care law.
Culture
areas with large minority populations are more likely to be overcrowded and to divert ambulances, delaying timely emergency care, according to a multi-institutional study focused on California.
The researchers examined ambulance diversion in more than 200 hospitals around the state to assess whether overcrowding in emergency rooms disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities. They found that minorities are more at risk of being impacted by ER crowding and by diversion than non-minorities.
The study will be published in the August issue of Health Affairs.
MINNEAPOLIS (August 6, 2012) – University of Minnesota School of Public Health researchers have found that medical group practices can reduce costs for patients with diabetes by investing in improved quality of care.
Despite a twenty-five year old law that bans "patient dumping" the practice continues to put uninsured Americans at risk, according to a national team of researchers led by a professor at the George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services. Patient dumping is the practice of turning away or transferring uninsured patients with emergency medical conditions.
Health coverage for the poorest Americans could be in jeopardy in many states as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last month on the Affordable Care Act, according to a new legal analysis. The report examines federal and state Medicaid options following the United States Supreme Court's ruling in NFIB v Sebelius and appears in the August issue of the journal Health Affairs.
Hearing generic language to describe a category of people, like "boys have short hair," can cause children to endorse a range of other stereotypes about the category, a study by researchers at New York University and Princeton University has found. Their research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) outlines methods to reduce stereotyping and prejudice.
Microbes, sponges, and worms—the side effects of pollution and heavy fishing—are adding insult to injury in Kenya's imperiled reef systems, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Azores.
The authors of the study have found that pollution and overfishing on reef systems have an ecological cascading effect—the proliferation of microbes, sponges, and worms—that further degrade corals, a discovery that underlines the complexity of reefs and possible solutions.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Young children who are able to pay attention and persist on a task have a 50 percent greater chance of completing college, according to a new study at Oregon State University.
Tracking a group of 430 preschool-age children, the study gives compelling evidence that social and behavioral skills, such as paying attention, following directions and completing a task may be even more crucial than academic abilities.
And the good news for parents and educators, the researchers said, is that attention and persistence skills are malleable and can be taught.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A study from University of Illinois economics professors demonstrates a new method to analyze the relationships among voters' issue preferences, the candidates' policy positions and voter behavior.
Estimating the distribution of voter preferences and the extent of policy divergence between the candidates' platforms, economics professors Stefan Krasa and Mattias Polborn are able to separate observed changes in voter behavior into those driven by voter radicalization versus those caused by increased policy differences between the two parties.
New research by University of Warwick historian Dr Tim Lockley has found why yellow fever had a green bias in 19th century fever outbreaks in the southern states of the US. Almost half of the 650 people killed by yellow fever in Savannah Georgia in 1854 were Irish immigrants.
New research suggests the more friends we have on Facebook, the less likely we are to share information about charitable causes.
Economist Professor Kimberley Scharf, from the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) at the University of Warwick, claims when we have larger online social networks, we rely on other people to pass on information about opportunities to give. This phenomenon is called 'free riding'.
An international research team, led from the University of Leeds, has found that a common anti-angina drug could help protect the heart against carbon monoxide poisoning.
Animal studies have shown that the anti-angina drug ranolazine can significantly reduce the number of deaths from arrhythmias – irregular or abnormally paced heartbeats – that have been triggered by carbon monoxide.
The findings could have important implications for the development of a protective treatment for adults and children who have been exposed to toxic levels of the gas.
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Voters' racial attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, may be a significant factor in this year's U.S. presidential election, particularly since whites tend to prefer people of their own race, according to research presented at the 120th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.
Leaky pipes are a common problem for the water industry: according to UK regulator, Ofwat, between 20 and 40 per cent of the UK's total water supply can be lost through damaged pipes. Developing more accurate ways of finding leaks would enable water companies to save revenue and reduce their environmental impact.
The system invented at Sheffield tests pipes by transmitting a pressure wave along them that sends back a signal if it passes any unexpected features, such as a leak or a crack in the pipe's surface.
In this study, the guinea pigs' hearts had an injury to the left ventricle, the thick walled lower chamber in the heart that pumps oxygenated blood to the body. The injury left a scar and thinned the ventricle, which showed both reduced pump function and greater susceptibility to arrhythmias.
Injured hearts that received the human cardiac muscle cell grafts showed partial re-muscularization of the scarred left ventricle.
Consistent with previous studies, tests showed that the injured hearts with the human cardiac cell grafts had improved mechanical function.