Facilities and Staff This Viewpoint by Guddati argues that facility policies that fail to provide adequate PPE for health care professionals, including those that prohibit using scarce PPE (specifically masks) when seeing patients not confirmed to be positive for COVID-19,
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Policies, Guidance, Reports, and Expert Perspectives HHS Civil Rights guidance: Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in Covid-19 treatments will threaten Federal funding – On Monday, July 20, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights issued guidance warning
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Facilities & Providers In response to case surge in Arizona, hospitals in the state requested waiver of several legal requirements that generally protect patients against abuse, neglect, and discrimination, as detailed in this Arizona Republic article. The state health department
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Vulnerable Populations A webinar TODAY (Thursday, July 9 at 3pm EST) from the Network for Public Health Law addresses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on diverse vulnerable populations, including Black/African Americans and Latinx, persons with disabilities, immigrants, persons who
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Is Contact Tracing Working? Contact tracing is a race. But few U.S. states say how fast they’re running. Excellent Washington Post report on the lack of publicly-available data on state and local contact tracing efforts. Contact tracing is a central
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Testing Supplies and Capacity This N.Y. Times article details continuing challenges regarding availability and processing of coronavirus testing kits in Arizona, which has experienced a surge in COVID-19 cases. Drive-up testing sites have 3-mile lines, labs have twice as many
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TRIAGE AND RESOURCE ALLOCATION This webinar on Thursday at 3pm EST from the Network for Public Health Law includes expert speakers on critical ethical issues related to COVID-19, including ventilator allocation, triage priority, and the consideration of age, disabilities, and
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HEALTH CARE WORKERS This article focuses on the continued problem of nursing home staffing as highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic, nursing home shortages of direct-care staff were common and persistent. The fact that nursing home residents
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The Moral Determinants of Health – legendary health care researcher Donald Berwick authors a Viewpoint in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing for health professionals and systems embracing the moral determinants of health, including a “strong sense of
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DRUGS This op-ed by Crutchfield, Gibb, and Redinger tackles issues of distributing remdesivir, an antiviral drug that shows promise in reducing COVID-19 recovery time. Using Michigan as an example, the authors argue that fair allocation of the drug requires prioritizing
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