healthcare workforce

In the Washington Post, Sandra G. Boodman writes about anger management problems in healthcare: At a critical point in a complex abdominal operation, a surgeon was handed a device that didn’t work because it had been loaded incorrectly by a surgical technician. Furious that she couldn’t use it, the surgeon slammed it down, accidentally breaking the technician’s finger. “I felt pushed beyond my limits,” recalled the surgeon, who was suspended for two weeks and told to attend an anger management course for doctors. The 2011 incident illuminates a long-festering problem that many hospitals have…
In order to meet the healthcare needs of populations at the local, national, and global levels, we're going to need to think carefully about which providers can do which kinds of tasks. Pieces in Washington Post and New York Times blogs this week highlight projects that reconsider what kinds of providers patients need to see to get care for particular conditions. In the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff describes efforts by Albuquerque physician Sanjeev Arora to make Hepatitis C treatment available to patients across New Mexico. Arora is one of a small number of Hepatitis C specialists…
At the Millennium Development Goal summit last month, one of the sessions addressed the issue of the global healthcare workforce. We don't have enough healthcare workers to deliver needed care to the world's population, and until we address this problem it'll be next to impossible to meet the goals of reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating diseases like AIDS and malaria. One major challenge is simply that there aren't enough trained healthcare professionals, but the distribution of the existing healthcare workforce is also a pressing issue. At the global level,…