BLOG Medicine

New Orleans: Health Challenges

The Saturday, 4 August 2007 New Orleans Advocate reported that while the city is still facing the same significant healthcare needs and large racial disparities in health that existed prior to 2005's Hurricane Katrina, the storms also had a leveling affect across many health access and utilization measures, creating new access to care barriers for many still living in the region.

The basis for the article is the recently released report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, "Health Challenges for the People of New Orleans," that acknowledged that Katrina has made life more difficult for everyone in the area.

The Kaiser report is the result of a door-to-door survey of 1,500 residents in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, and Plaquemines parishes in Fall 2006.■

MassBay Nursing Program in Jeopardy

Massachusetts regulatory officials have barred the Massachusetts Bay Community College (MassBay) from accepting new nursing students pending correction of serious deficiencies in the Wellesley-based college's popular nursing program, one of the largest in the state.  A two-year school, the 432-student nursing program graduated 93 students last year.

Peter Schworm's Boston Globe article describes issues including the lack of a dean, nursing program administrator, and several nursing instructors as well as grade-tampering as the primary causes for the possible loss of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Nursing's approval.  Nurses are required to graduate from a board-approved program to be licensed.

Schworm describes an unstable school with a nursing program already in disarray, suffering from the school's recent reorganization that resulted in the loss of a significant number of faculty and administrators.  Recruitment efforts have also been hurt by budget constraints that prevent the school from offering competitive salaries.

Problems with the MassBay nursing program couldn't come at a worser time.  An American Association of Colleges of Nurses (AACN) factsheet points to 118,000 vacant RN positions as of April 2006 and estimates more than 1.2 million new and replacement nurses needed by 2014.  Government analysts project that more than 703,000 new RN positions will be created through 2014, two-fifths of all new jobs in the health care sector.

The Massachusetts Center for Nursing (MCN) lists a number of profiles and reports on the Massachusetts nursing faculty shortage including a Massachusetts Association of Colleges of Nurses (MACN) assessment of the current nursing shortage and strategies for expanding educational capacity.

It's time for Carole Berotte Joseph, MassBay's President and the first Haitian to head a U.S. college, to step up and exhibit some much-needed leadership by taking expeditious and appropriate action to correct the nursing program deficiencies and fully address regulator's concerns.  If Berotte Joseph proves not up to the task, MassBay's Board of Trustees have actions of their own to take.  This program is too vital to the patient community and economic health of both the state and the region to be allowed to founder any longer.■

AHRQ State Snapshot Web Tool

The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released their latest state snapshot of health care quality on 11 June.  The AHRQ web tool launched in 2005.

The application is meant to help state health leaders, researchers, and consumers understand the status of health care quality in individual states, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses.

The annual state snapshots are drawn from over 30 sources, including government surveys, health care facilities and health care organizations.■