From a shortage of wheelchair vans to a looming shortage of nursing-school faculty, from weak Medicare reimbursements to soaring cost of part-time medical staff, from burned-out nurses who quit to patients who get sicker while waiting to be seen, it is hard to find an area of health care in New Hampshire that isn’t struggling as the pandemic era enters its fourth year.
That’s the start of my piece today from a media event held by a bunch of New Hampshire hospitals. A number of other outlets also covered the event and had stories.
One should always take “woe is me, we need government help!” industry reports but I think this one is legit. Health care all over the developing world is still reeling, as I noted recently.
One thing I learned that was new to me: There’s a proposed bill (SB58) which would allow police “to arrest a person without a warrant for interfering with the provision of medically-necessary health care services.” The frenzy of anti-vax cranks just keeps growing.
“I was anticipating that collectively as a society … on the backside of this we’d celebrate the improvements (in health care), we’d celebrate the learnings. Instead, we are hyper-polarized: ‘I don’t actually have COVID even though I’m on a ventilator, that’s not what this is, give me Ivermectin’,” said Dr. Greg Baxter, CEO of Elliot Health System. It only takes one such angry patient interaction, he said, “before a person walks out of health care. They just can’t have that fight again.”
Note: what Baxter said was “it takes N=1 before a person walks out of health care” but I didn’t think most readers would follow that statistics terminology.
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