Archive for » April 9th, 2012«

09 Apr 2012

Are psychiatrist salaries too high at Utah State Hospital?

Nine of Utah’s 10 highest state salaries, outside academia, are earned by psychiatrists at the Utah State Hospital for the mentally ill.

Those figures — between $273,000 and $480,000 in salary and benefits — surprise some mental health consumers, who would like to see more money routed to other public mental health services, particularly the hospital’s lower level staff who they believe works more frequently with residents.

—

Salary and benefits by the numbers

Some community members criticize the high pay of psychiatrists at Utah State Hospital, but many other state employees earn as much or more:

University of Utah football coach Kyle Whittingham » $1.5 million

University of Utah orthopedics professor John T. Smith » $1 million

University of Utah chief of the Division of Otolaryngology Clough Shelton » $1 million

Utah State Hospital clinical director and psychiatrist Richard Spencer » $480,869

Utah Transit Authority chief executive officer John Inglish » $351,891

Source: www.utahsright.com


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And Rep. John Dougall, R-American Fork has previously raised questions about compensation of medical staff at the hospital. “Whenever I see a number that large that’s being funded with taxpayer dollars it causes me concern,” he said. “It causes one to say ‘Is that really a necessary expense’?”

But experts and studies suggest the salaries are in line with those nationally. And with the spreading shortage of psychiatrists, the state could be forced to pay even more if the hospital lost doctors and had difficulty recruiting.

Whether Utah has an actual deficit of psychiatrists is a matter of debate, but experts agree mental health professionals are in high demand. Directors of publicly funded institutions such as the hospital and University Neuropsychiatric Institute (UNI) say they have lost psychiatrists to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Utah and Intermountain Healthcare because of higher salaries.

Utah’s growing population and the prevalence of such common disorders as depression is exacerbating the need for mental health experts.

The problem seems to be growing nationally: The National Resident Matching Program, which tracks medical school graduates’ residency acceptance, says fewer U.S. students graduating from medical school chose to specialize in psychiatry over the past several years. Though large metropolitan areas such as Chicago and New York have an adequate supply of psychiatrists, less populated areas are particularly in need, said Sidney Weissman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Northwestern University.

“The ability of our society to deliver mental health care to rural areas is significantly impaired,” he said.

In Montana, one wing of a new mental health facility for veterans was unable to take patients for about a year because it could not fill three psychiatrist positions. Though staff is now being hired, veterans had to travel all over the country — including Utah — to get help.

—

Time with patients » The American Psychiatric Association suggests that school loan debt may be playing a role in students’ decision to seek more lucrative careers. For the first time, UNI turned to a head hunter this year as it worked to fill several psychiatric jobs.

“It’s not uncommon to see people with $200,000 debt coming out of [medical] residency,” said Ross VanVranken, the institute’s executive director.

For those who do choose psychiatry as a career, some private sector jobs can pay significantly higher. A 2011 survey of psychiatrists nationally found that more than half made between $175,000 and $300,000 excluding benefits.

In fact, a 2011 Utah public employee salary survey found that state employees in the medical field make about 10 percent less than those in the private sector. Yet benefits are very good: state employees contribute about 10 percent of health care benefit costs where private industry employees typically pay between 15 and 29 percent, the analysis found.

Higher private sector pay isn’t the only factor. Working at a state hospital means caring for severely ill patients who may be unresponsive to treatment. Improvement can take years. And staff have a higher risk of being assaulted.

“If you hire people for low wages and get them to come and they only stay briefly then you have major turnover problems and that’s negative in terms of care,” said Michael Hoge, a professor at the Yale department of psychiatry.

Even so, salaries can seem inordinately high to those receiving service.

Tommy Tanzer of Park City, whose adult stepdaughter was treated successfully for schizophrenia at the state hospital several decades ago, believes paying too much for the people at the top is what tends to happen with government-run institutions. Yet he fears financial pruning could occur if the issue gets too much attention.

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Copyright 2012 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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09 Apr 2012

Kidney "living donations" favor some patient groups


By Kerry Grens

NEW YORK |
Mon Apr 9, 2012 3:27pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Americans who receive a kidney from someone who is not a relative tend to be white, highly educated and live in wealthier neighborhoods, according to a new study that calls for wider outreach to promote living donation.

Researchers say the findings demonstrate that financial and educational barriers to donating a kidney make it harder for the poor and minorities to give or receive an organ.

“We’re not doing enough in this country to remove disincentives to living donation,” said Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, senior author of the study and director of the kidney and pancreas transplant program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Although medical costs for a live donor are typically covered by health insurance, additional expenses — such as travel, lodging and time off of work — are not.

The kidney is one of the few organs a person can give away, yet still lead a healthy life afterwards with one remaining kidney.

Since the 1990s, advances in immune-suppression have made it safer to receive an organ from someone who is not biologically related. Less-invasive surgery techniques also make it easier to give a kidney.

To see who is most likely to take advantage of that opportunity, Danovitch and his colleagues looked back on information about all 39,000 adult kidney transplants in the U.S. from 1997 to 2007 that occurred between a patient and a live donor.

They gathered up data on education, race, insurance type, zip code and whether people were related.

Spouses and immediate family were considered related, while distant relatives, friends, colleagues and others were considered unrelated.

Danovitch’s group found that kidney donations from non-relatives have become more common, rising from seven percent of live donations in 1997 to 26 percent in 2006.

In most cases when patients seek a live donor, they look for a match among close family first, and non-relatives second.

Sometimes there is no relative able to offer a healthy kidney, however, because a common condition that leads to kidney failure — polycystic kidney disease — tends to run in families.

Danovitch said that in a few cases organs came from volunteers who had no relationship at all with the transplant recipient, but the vast majority of the time the unrelated donors had an emotional relationship with the patient — mostly they were friends.

His team also found that both unrelated donors and recipients were generally older, likely to live in slightly higher-income neighborhoods than related donors and recipients and more likely to have completed a college degree.

Unrelated-transplant recipients were about 20 percent more likely than the related pairs to be in their 40s or 50s than to be under 40, for example. And they were about 25 percent more likely to be white, than to be black or Hispanic.

Thirty-nine percent of kidney recipients who were unrelated to their donors also had college degrees, compared to 35 percent of related recipients.

Patients with higher socioeconomic status are probably more likely to have access to potential donors who have similar means and resources, Danovitch’s group writes in their report, published in the Journal of Urology.

“It’s not because (people in lower socioeconomic-status groups) care about their loved ones any less, but because they can’t pay for the flight, the hotel, or losing their job,” he told Reuters Health.

Kidney donors typically have to take six weeks off work after the transplant, said Dr. Arthur Matas, the director of the Renal Transplant Program at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the new study.

Matas said that informational barriers might explain the finding that recipients of organs from unrelated donors are more likely to have had more formal education.

“If you don’t know how to get access to healthcare, then you’re not going to get referred to the tertiary centers that do (living donor) transplants,” Matas told Reuters Health.

“Formal education level may correlate with awareness of the benefits of living donation, which can affect the willingness to donate and receive a kidney,” Danovitch’s team writes.

Cultural differences could also factor in to the results, they note.

Dr. Amber Reeves-Daniel, the medical director of abdominal organ transplant at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, said she’s made a similar observation at her center — that African American transplant recipients almost always receive a live donor kidney from a relative.

“I think there’s a sense of closeness in the African American family structure of, ‘we’re going to make this work,’” said Reeves-Daniel, who was not involved in the study. “If that doesn’t work out, then they say, ‘I would just get a kidney from a deceased donor,’” rather than seek out a kidney donor outside of the family.

The trouble with waiting for a kidney from a deceased donor is that hopeful recipients far outnumber the availability of organs. According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, 91,000 people are waiting for a kidney.

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is in charge of the waiting list for deceased-donor organs.

UNOS would not comment on the study because the organization does not allocate living-donor organs.

“One of the great benefits of living kidney donor transplant is you don’t have to wait,” said Dr. John Friedewald at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, who did not participate in the research.

While there are health risks for people who donate a kidney, Danovitch said he’d like to see more people have the chance to donate if they want to.

That might include finding ways to reimburse people for the costs that insurance companies typically don’t cover, such as time off work.

Low-income organ donors can seek some financial help from the National Living Donor Assistance Center, a federally-funded program to help cover the costs of providing an organ.

Danovitch said in addition to the financial hurdles, the educational barriers also need to be addressed to make sure all kidney donors and recipients have an equal opportunity to share.

SOURCE: bit.ly/HXPXRn Journal of Urology, online March 15, 2012.


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09 Apr 2012

Charities expose almost 500K Social Security numbers by filing their own taxes

April 09, 2012, 3:44 PM — The big data-security news today is the revelation that the data breach announced by Utah Medicaid services last week compromise the financial, medical and other personal information of between 280,000 and 500,000 people, not the 24,000-some that previous reports estimated.

Investigators have theorized that organized crime gangs in Eastern Europe are responsible for the attack April first or second on the Utah Department of Health servers, which netted private data on 181,604 Medicaid clients.

It’s a huge attack that will have repercussions for years to come. A far lower-key series of data leaks may pose a far greater risk than any one-time data heist, however.

The problem is the tax forms that both corporations and individuals fill out in order to get credit for their largesse.

To make a donation tax deductible, taxpayers need a receipt. To get it they often have to fill out and submit to the charity a copy of IRS tax form 990. Donors don’t have to put their Social Security numbers on the forms.

Until concerns about identity theft began to grow earlier this decade, however, it was common for non-profits to ask for SSNs on the 990 forms, even though the forms are officially public property and are stamped with the words “Open to Public Inspection.”

In a review of millions of IRS 990 forms, New York identity-theft-prevention vendor Identity Finder reports it was able to harvest almost 500,000 Social Security numbers (full report as a PDF).

Identity Finder’s main product Identity Finder, can be installed on PCs and Macs, or on corporate networks to scan all available hard drives and identify sensitive data that is stored unencrypted and unsecured. It can then either delete the data, lock it up or send business managers a notice highlighting the potential exposure of their departments.

In a review of almost three million tax returns and other formsfiled by non-profits between 2001 and 2006, Identity Finder discovered 132,362 charities and non-profits filed 990s exposing a total of 472,866 Social Security numbers – 171,005 of which were unique.

About 18 percent of all non-profit tax returns included at least one Social Security number, at least 35 percent of the time, one of the SSNs on the tax documents was that of the accountant or other tax preparer, who identified themselves using the number.

“Unlike a credit card number, Social Security numbers cannot easily be revoked,” according to a statement from Todd Feinman, CEO of Identity Finder. “Given the seriousness and ubiquity of identity fraud, tax preparers should avoid including SSNs on Form 990s.”

One West-Coast charity published the names, addresses, SSNs and payment amounts for 2,901 people, the most complete breach in the list.

According to General Accountability Office definitions, the 990 forms for 76,799 organizations qualify as data breaches, though laws requiring organizations reveal data breaches, Security Management points out.

The magazine also points out the additional risks tax data breaches pose. The National Gang Intelligence Center, for example, warns that prison gangs have been requesting public tax information as a way to create fake tax returns that can be filed by accomplices on the outside, netting the gang a significant source of cash from tax returns.

Identity Finder recommended that donors leave their SSNs off documents whenever possible and ask non-profits or anyone else to justify their request for the number before providing it.

Non-profits shouldn’t put SSNs of donors on their own tax documents and should check

Tax preparers, who should probably know better anyway, should identify themselves using Preparer Tax Identification Numbers (PTIN) rather than SSNs.

Unfortunately, the other recommendations have less chance of being honored. Among them is the suggestion the IRS and courts should only provide copies of IRS form 990s with the SSNs blacked out and that the IRS should publish updates that say explicitly SSNs are not required on form 990 and should not be included.

The vendor also put up a web tool that can tell you if any SSNs from your company are among those that could have fallen into the wrong hands.

It doesn’t work for individuals, because it would require they type in their own SSNs, exposing them further.

To use the tool, type in your company’s Employer ID Number and hit Enter.

Using it is nearly as easy as it would have been for non-profits not to publish your Social Security number on public documents in the first place.

Read more of Kevin Fogarty’s CoreIT blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Kevin on Twitter at @KevinFogarty. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

Reuters


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09 Apr 2012

Mental Health may start billing by October

Mental Health officials are hoping they’ll be able to bill patients as soon as October.

Until then, services at Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse will continue to be provided for free.

Director Wilfred Aflague said for years the department has not billed patients for services rendered because there is no fee schedule that delineates the cost of services, supplies and medication — something that is required if the agency were to bill a patient’s insurance company, Medicare or Medicaid.

Previous efforts to create a fee schedule were started but never finished, Aflague said.

Aflague said since being named director two years ago he’s been working on creating a fee schedule. If all goes well, he’s hoping to get the new fee schedule in place by the start of fiscal 2013. The government of Guam’s new fiscal year starts Oct. 1.

Aflague said he’s not sure how much money has been lost over the years and couldn’t provide an estimate of the amount that the department would generate by billing clients.

He said the amount wouldn’t come up to the $17 million that the governor’s office is requesting on the department’s behalf to run the department in fiscal 2013.

“We won’t generate that much,” he said, noting that GovGuam may need to continue to subsidize a portion of the department’s operational costs.

Currently, the agency’s budget is paid for by taxpayers.

In a letter to Gov. Eddie Calvo on Friday, Vice Speaker Benjamin Cruz said Mental Health can “wean itself off the taxpayer by charging the insurance companies for its services.”

According to a press release from Cruz’ office, the vice speaker has been pressuring the department to create a fee schedule so it can charge patients for services rendered, medicine provided and medical supplies used during the course of treatment.

Process

Aflague said getting the fees approved will take some time but he’s hopeful that it will go smoothly.

His office — working with the federal team charged with helping the agency improve its services — has been putting together the fee schedule. He anticipates holding public hearings within the next few weeks.

The self-imposed deadline to publish announcements that a hearing will be taking place is Saturday. He said about 10 days after the announcement, the first public hearing will be held and, if necessary a second hearing will be held depending on questions raised.

The agency will then make necessary changes to the fee schedule as well as create an economic impact statement — both will be sent to the Guam Office of the Attorney General for review. After the AG’s office, the governor’s office will review the proposal, and then the document moves to the Legislature for final approval.

“We’re targeting the middle of May to submit it to the Legislature,” Aflague said.


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09 Apr 2012

HEALTHeCAREERS Debuts Psychiatry and Mental Health Careers Page

DENVER, CO, Apr 09, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) –
HEALTHeCAREERS Network (HeCN), the only online single-source
healthcare recruiting solution, today announced the debut of its
Psychiatry and Mental Health Jobs Page. The new resource provides
psychiatry and mental health professionals an exclusive career
destination comprised of job postings, tools, and other professional
development resources. The Psychiatry and Mental Health Careers Page
is the only one of its kind, bringing together employers, recruiters
and qualified candidates interested in positions exclusive to this
sector.

Mental health jobs are on the rise. The Bureau of Labor Statistics
projects that the United States will add some 6,000 psychiatry jobs
through 2018. A number of factors are driving the sector’s growth,
including accelerating healthcare costs and the aging baby boomer
population. Analysts predict that with these factors a disparate
number of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders will emerge,
increasing the demand for psychiatry jobs.

As a one-stop solution for employers and recruiters looking for
positions related to psychiatry and mental health, this Careers Page
specifically targets psychiatry and mental health professionals,
driving qualified job seekers to employer job postings. This helps
employers fill specialized openings more quickly and efficiently,
while providing potential candidates unique career advancement
opportunities. In addition to psychiatry and mental health, HeCN’s
other specialty career pages include neurology, pediatrics, internal
medicine, cardiology, and family medicine.

“This page gives employers a focused place to fulfill their
recruitment needs in psychiatry and mental health,” said Mike Tansey,
CEO of HEALTHeCAREERS Network. “The addition of this page expands on
our already extensive suite of career resource pages targeted to a
diverse and broad set of medical professions, maintaining our stance
as the solution to healthcare recruitment needs.”

For more information on mental health and psychiatry careers and job
opportunities, please visit

www.healthecareers.com/psychiatry-mental-health-jobs .

The following is a suggested tweet to announce the news. For
additional information regarding the new Psychiatry and Mental Health
Jobs Page via Twitter, please follow along with @Healthecareers.


        --  RT @Healthecareers: New Psychiatry + Mental Health Careers Page for

http://bit.ly/HRczSc                characters left)

About HEALTHeCAREERS
HEALTHeCAREERS Network (HeCN) is the only true
online single-source healthcare recruiting solution for all
healthcare recruitment needs, providing unparalleled access to job
seekers across disciplines and specialties, and employment
opportunities specific to individual career paths. Designed to match
qualified medical professionals with healthcare employers, HeCN also
serves as a career destination complete with news, information,
events, career resources, and recruitment tools. To learn more about
HeCN and our offerings for employers, recruiters and job seekers,
please visit
www.healthecareers.com , our blog, or follow us on
Facebook and Twitter.

SOURCE: HEALTHeCAREERS Network

Copyright 2012 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.


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09 Apr 2012

Month dedicated to raising awareness of organ donations


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April is National Donate Life Month, and people all over the United States are spreading the word about the importance of being an organ donor. 

Did you know nationally, there are over 100,000 people waiting for life sustaining organs and 2,800 of them are in the state of Virginia? On average, 18 men, women and children die each day waiting for an organ transplant.

Three Virginians die each week, and about every 10 minutes someone is added to the life-saving organ list. There are about 28,000 organ transplants that take place each year, and over 700 of them are in Virginia.

Organ donation is the process of giving an organ or a part of an organ for the purpose of transplantation into another person.

• One organ donor can save up to nine lives.

• One tissue donor can enhance over 50 lives.

• One cornea donor can bring sight to two people

• You can donate to research, therapy and education.

Halifax Regional Health System has partnered with LifeNet Health to enhance the opportunity for organ donation and life-saving transplants. LifeNet Health is a leading, federally designated Organ Procurement Organization that coordinates the recovery and transplant of organs in Virginia and part of West Virginia and offers a comprehensive program of bereavement support for donor families and educates the public about donation.

On Tuesday, Halifax Regional Hospital participated in a donor drive. There was a table set up in the hospital for employees and visitors to learn more about the facts and myths of organ donation, and they were able to register to become an organ donor.

At this table were Kia Potts, community education coordinator for LifeNet Health, and Mary Jackson, a double cornea recipient.

When asked why people should become organ donors, Jackson said, “To give someone else that second chance to live their life and fulfill their dreams.”

Halifax Regional Health System typically has over 200 referrals for donation per year which is a combination of eye, tissue and organ referrals and about five tissue donors per year.

Already in 2012, Halifax Regional Health System had their first organ donor since 1988, and the donation saved another man’s life. Included in this gift was the recovery of eyes and other vital tissues. The transplant of these tissues was part of the donation process.

For more information on organ donation or to register to become an organ donor, visit www.DonateLifeVirginia.org.


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09 Apr 2012

Charities’ Tax Returns Expose Social Security Numbers to Public, According to …

NEW YORK, April 9, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ –
Identity Finder, LLC (
http://www.identityfinder.com ) today released the most comprehensive analysis of sensitive information contained within public IRS Form 990 tax returns ever performed. Using the Identity Finder DLP 6.0 software, security researches searched 2,892,475 IRS Form 990s from tax years 2001 through 2006 for personally identifiable information such as social security numbers (SSNs).

The Form 990 is the tax return form for tax-exempt organizations such as public charities and private foundations. Even though SSNs are not generally required on a Form 990, Identity Finder found that 132,362 organizations published 472,866 SSNs, of which 171,005 were unique. Between 2001 and 2006, more than 18% of all non-profit organizations or their tax preparers published at least one SSN on their public tax return. In all, 287,238 Form 990 returns contained at least one SSN.

All Form 990s are “Open to Public Inspection,” and are regularly published by the IRS and multiple third parties. High school and college scholarship recipients, tax preparers, directors, employees, trustees, and donors were the primary populations whose SSNs were exposed. At least 35% of the total SSNs belonged to tax preparers who identified themselves by their SSN instead of Preparer Tax Identification Number (PTIN). Charitable organizations who believe they might have exposed SSNs on their Form 990s may find out more information by using Identity Finder’s easy-to-use web tool to determine how many.

“Organizations and tax preparers must understand the risks of including social security numbers on public documents, such as the IRS 990 form,” said Todd Feinman, CEO of Identity Finder. “Unlike a credit card number, social security numbers cannot easily be revoked. Given the seriousness and ubiquity of identity fraud, tax preparers should avoid including SSNs on Form 990s.”

Given that it is currently tax season, Identity Finder issued the following guidance to individuals and charitable organizations:

Nonprofit organizations who have published SSNs should warn those affected that they may be at increased risk of identity fraud.

Organizations should avoid placing personal information (especially SSNs) on public documents such as Form 990s and court documents.

College foundations should determine whether exposure of student PII on tax returns violates provisions of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA).

Donors should not share their SSN with charities.

Scholarship applicants should review the most recent Form 990 of any foundation prior to applying to verify that they do not publish SSNs.

Individuals should always require any organization to justify a request for his or her SSN.

Tax preparers should provide their PTIN rather than their SSN on tax documents.

Tax preparers should ensure no PII is unnecessarily disclosed on IRS forms they approve.

The IRS should publish explicit guidance explaining that SSNs are not to be published on Form 990s.

The IRS and other stewards of past 990 filings should only provide redacted copies of the forms.

The IRS, courts, and private stewards of public documents should use data loss prevention and data discovery software such as Identity Finder to prevent the disclosure of PII on documents made public.

To download Identity Finder’s complete report and find out whether your organization published SSNs on its Form 990, visit
http://www.identityfinder.com/990report .

About Identity Finder

The company’s data discovery technology provides users the ability to prevent identity theft and data leakage. They are a leader in identity protection and data loss prevention (DLP). For more information, visit
http://www.identityfinder.com .

Media Contact

Victoria SolteroIdentity Finder, LLC +1-888-244-3790vs990@identityfinder.com

This press release was issued through eReleases(R). For more information, visit eReleases Press Release Distribution at
http://www.ereleases.com .

SOURCE Identity Finder, LLC

Copyright (C) 2012 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

Comtex


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09 Apr 2012

HEALTHeCAREERS Debuts Psychiatry and Mental Health Careers Page

DENVER, CO–(Marketwire -04/09/12)- HEALTHeCAREERS Network (HeCN), the only online single-source healthcare recruiting solution, today announced the debut of its Psychiatry and Mental Health Jobs Page. The new resource provides psychiatry and mental health professionals an exclusive career destination comprised of job postings, tools, and other professional development resources. The Psychiatry and Mental Health Careers Page is the only one of its kind, bringing together employers, recruiters and qualified candidates interested in positions exclusive to this sector.

Mental health jobs are on the rise. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the United States will add some 6,000 psychiatry jobs through 2018. A number of factors are driving the sector’s growth, including accelerating healthcare costs and the aging baby boomer population. Analysts predict that with these factors a disparate number of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders will emerge, increasing the demand for psychiatry jobs.

As a one-stop solution for employers and recruiters looking for positions related to psychiatry and mental health, this Careers Page specifically targets psychiatry and mental health professionals, driving qualified job seekers to employer job postings. This helps employers fill specialized openings more quickly and efficiently, while providing potential candidates unique career advancement opportunities. In addition to psychiatry and mental health, HeCN’s other specialty career pages include neurology, pediatrics, internal medicine, cardiology, and family medicine.

“This page gives employers a focused place to fulfill their recruitment needs in psychiatry and mental health,” said Mike Tansey, CEO of HEALTHeCAREERS Network. “The addition of this page expands on our already extensive suite of career resource pages targeted to a diverse and broad set of medical professions, maintaining our stance as the solution to healthcare recruitment needs.”

For more information on mental health and psychiatry careers and job opportunities, please visit www.healthecareers.com/psychiatry-mental-health-jobs.

The following is a suggested tweet to announce the news. For additional information regarding the new Psychiatry and Mental Health Jobs Page via Twitter, please follow along with @Healthecareers.

About HEALTHeCAREERS
HEALTHeCAREERS Network (HeCN) is the only true online single-source healthcare recruiting solution for all healthcare recruitment needs, providing unparalleled access to job seekers across disciplines and specialties, and employment opportunities specific to individual career paths. Designed to match qualified medical professionals with healthcare employers, HeCN also serves as a career destination complete with news, information, events, career resources, and recruitment tools. To learn more about HeCN and our offerings for employers, recruiters and job seekers, please visit www.healthecareers.com, our blog, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.


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09 Apr 2012

Task force seeks to change California’s mental health commitment law

SAN FRANCISCO — A homeless man plagued by schizophrenia is beaten to death by police in Fullerton. A man from Fort Bragg fixates on aliens for years while denying he is ill, then kills two men before dying in a gunfight with law enforcement. A Nevada County mental health client who had refused additional care storms into a clinic and kills three workers.

Those headline grabbers, according to a task force pressing to change the California law that governs involuntary civil commitment to psychiatric hospitals, were merely the most visible signs of a broken system.

Tens of thousands of mentally ill people wind up each year in California jails and prisons, cycle in and out of overburdened hospital emergency rooms or die on the streets.

California’s pioneering Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, passed in 1967, gave legal rights to those who previously could have been locked up indefinitely and treated against their will. But the task force — made up of family members, mental health professionals, judges and public defenders — contends that the law has failed those unable or unwilling to seek help.

They are calling for sweeping changes that would allow the involuntary commitment of those deemed incapable of making treatment decisions, expand the use of conservatorships, lengthen involuntary hospital stays and standardize the checkerboard way the law has been applied from county to county.

“Nobody wants to round people up and tie them down and give them shots,” said task force member Mark Gale, a mental health activist whose son has a diagnosed schizoaffective disorder. “What we want is for people who should be evaluated to get that evaluation, and for people who need crisis care to get crisis care.”

The self-appointed group recently released its report after 30 months of study. And some of its recommendations are likely to receive broad consensus. Among them: consistent application of the law statewide, interagency coordination to ensure that patients are promptly placed in appropriate hospitals, availability of crisis stabilization services in every county, and standardized training for police and others who respond to those in need.

But proposals that would broaden the terms of involuntary commitment and conservatorship touch the third rail of mental health policy — and are likely to provoke a familiar contentious debate.

One camp, which includes client organizations and advocates, asserts that only voluntary care can truly be effective. The other, dominated by medical professionals and family members, says illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder often make sufferers incapable of the insight needed to engage in care voluntarily.

Furthermore, they note, jails, prisons and repeated brief hospital confinements end up delivering involuntary care regardless — at great cost.

“I’d go so far as to say that involuntary treatment has increased since implementation” of the act, said Randall Hagar, a task force member and director of government affairs for the California Psychiatric Assn.

Nearly 200,000 people in California get their outpatient services every year in a jail setting,” he said. “Something is really wrong with this picture.”

The report already has provoked outrage, most notably for its push to redefine “gravely disabled” to include an individual’s “capacity to make informed consent to treatment and assess their ability to care for their health and safety.”

“If I could send a message to the LPS Reform Task Force … I would like to tell them to please keep their mental health laws off my body,” said Charmaine Asher of Yorba Linda, 25, who has been diagnosed as suffering from major depression and treated against her will.

The client voice is nonexistent in the report, she said, adding that “there is no healing when force is involved.”

Dan Brzovic, an Oakland-based attorney with Disability Rights California, said “there is room for reform of the mental health system, and some of these proposals should be seriously considered.” But, he said, any effort to extend stays or broaden the definitions that allow for involuntary commitment should be strongly opposed.

“You place someone in a facility if they’re dangerous to society or themselves or unable to take care of themselves,” Brzovic said. “As we get away from that standard, while you may help some people, you have the potential of roping people in who don’t belong.”

Assemblyman Michael Allen (D-Santa Rosa) said he hoped to take on a broad examination of the issues in the fall.

“Everyone agrees that voluntary care is preferable to anything done on an involuntary basis,” he said. “But at what point … do we change things so people don’t have to go back to court multiple times to get a treatment plan for a loved one who doesn’t believe they are mentally ill?”

lee.romney@latimes.com


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09 Apr 2012

Family Life: Big Country moms donating breast milk to others around the state

There are a lot of conflicting thoughts on what is best when birthing and raising babies, but there is one thing doctors seem to agree unanimously on — breast feeding.

Earlier this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed its long-standing recommendation of exclusive breast feeding for at least six months, followed by continued breast feeding for one year or longer.

As much as doctors agree breast is best, some situations make it difficult for mother and infant to successfully breast feed, specifically prematurity. A popular remedy is breast milk donation, and many Abilene mothers are stepping up to the plate to provide breast milk for infants far beyond the Big Country.

Brooke Johnson, for example, uses the milk she produces not only for her own infant, but her extra milk is feeding another baby more than a hundred miles away. She’s long produced more than enough milk for her own children, but only recently realized she could donate the excess. It was while browsing the kid and baby pages within online marketplace Craigslist that Johnson came across a mother with a premature son looking for breast milk donations. She felt immediate kinship with the mother, she said, as both had babies the same ages — 15 months old and 3 months old.

It was Tiffany Jordan who was soliciting the donations for her son, Logan. The Midland mother said her premature son was the only of her seven kids she was not able to successfully breast feed herself.

“Prematurity is very, very, very hard,” Jordan said. Separated from her son while he stayed in the hospital following birth, she said she did her best to pump breast milk and deliver it to him.

“The hospital kept telling me I had to do more milk, more milk,” she said. “I did the best I could to continue to pump but it wasn’t enough.”

She heard about breast milk donation from a friend, she said, who was generous enough to share some of her own milk. More and more women in Midland stepped up, she said, all of them sharing their excess. A few in Abilene have volunteered as well, she said, through seeing requests she made online for milk donations. The generosity has allowed her to keep her premature son fed exclusively on breast milk.

“He has never had a drop of formula,” she said. “It’s beyond amazing. I feel as if Logan has a ton of mothers, a ton of siblings, who have given to unselfishly of themselves. Women who have not even known this child have given what they can to help him. It’s beyond words to tell you the truth.”

He’s never once been sick, she said, and is on track developmentally despite his prematurity. Both are things she believes are due to the ability to feed him breast milk instead of defaulting to formula.

In recent years, online networks of breast feeding mothers have supplemented already existing milk banks to make sharing milk easier than ever.

Still, moms and midwives agree milk is in high demand.

The Mothers’ Milk Bank of North Texas, for example, is a regional donation network that provides donated breast milk to premature babies in many North Texas hospitals. The network opened two donation depots in the Big Country in 2010, one in Abilene and one in Clyde, but the midwife collecting donations at the Abilene depot said they are still falling short of what is needed.

“We really could use a lot more donations,” Carol Hutson said. “We don’t have much milk being given.”

She said there are about four mothers in town currently donating to the Abilene depot, located at Tinyblessings Maternity Care. There are about 100 active donors in the entire milk bank network the Abilene depot is affiliated with according to Mothers’ Milk Bank of North Texas Donor Coordinator Simone Miller.

Donations made at the Abilene depot are transported to Fort Worth, Miller said, where they are later distributed to neonatal intensive care units in hospitals throughout North Texas. Hendrick Medical Center and Abilene Regional Medical Center do not use donated milk, so Big Country women donating through the network are sending needed milk to hospitals out of town. One of those donors is Snyder resident Angelica Jackson, who has donated more than 400 ounces of her milk to the bank.

When her 2-year-old son was an infant, she said she threw away a lot of extra milk, unaware of the high demand. She heard about the milk donation circuit around the time her 7-month-old daughter was born and she started saving and deep freezing unused milk for donation.

“I feel happy about it because I can help out other people who can’t do it,” she said. “I feel pretty proud that I can help.”

She feels the breast milk has been the best way to feed her own children and said she is thankful to provide the same to others.

The donation process is simple, she said. She contacted the milk bank. After filling out paperwork and completing a blood test, she was ready to donate.

Miller said it is thanks to mothers like Jackson that countless babies, most of them premature, have been able to more easily transition out of neonatal intensive care and successfully breast feed after their release from the hospital. Women often are unable to breast feed when babies are separated from then in neonatal intensive care. Giving them donated breast milk from birth helps the infants become healthy and helps mothers continue feeding them breast milk as they grow.

“The babies born extremely premature, that’s their survival,” she said of the breast milk, adding that being fed breast milk in the hospital opposed to formula makes it easier for babies to continue breast feeding when they return home with their mothers.

Ashleigh Outlaw is another Abilene mother giving away her extra milk. She heard about an online donation network from a friend, she said, and began donating when she realized how much extra milk her son was not consuming. Five months old now, she said her breast milk has helped her son stay healthy.

“As hard as it was in the beginning,” she said of breast feeding, “it’s definitely paid off. I wanted to share that if I could with a mom who can’t have it.”

It’s people like Outlaw who refuse to waste excess milk that Jordan said have made an incredible impact on the life another.

“As a mom, you just want the best thing for your kid. Not being able to give them that is hard, so hard,” she said. “That gift they give us, it’s amazing.”

Donations can be made to the Mothers’ Milk Bank of North Texas in the Big Country in Abilene, Stephenville and Clyde. To see a map of donation locations, visit texasmilkbank.org.

Donations can be made through online network Human Milk 4 Human Babies by visiting facebook.com/HM4HBTexas.


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