A new study published today in Health Affairs finds that the decade-long nurse shortage is easing, or even ending, partly as a result of the continuing recession. Study author Peter Buerhaus of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing and colleagues found that older nurses are delaying retirement or returning to the workforce and part-time nurses [...]

A public-private alliance known as the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) has greatly improved aviation safety. A similar alliance among health care stakeholders could reduce medication and device errors and wrong-site surgeries, renowned patient safety expert Peter Pronovost and coauthors say in an article published April 7 on the Health Affairs Web site. Pronovost is a [...]

Ever since an 18-year-old New York woman died tragically in 1984 under the care of medical residents who—in the view of her family—were overworked and undersupervised, the subject of the duty hours of physician trainees has simmered in the academic medical community and, on occasion, among public policymakers. Now, as the consequence of a new [...]

Editor’s Note: The November-December issue of Health Affairs contains essays by a physician and a medical interpreter on the challenges and perils of navigating language gaps between medical providers and patients in the absence of a trained medical interpreter. The essays appear in the journal’s “Narrative Matters” section, which is supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
The post [...]

As a nation, we have engaged in many debates and much discourse on how to improve America’s health care system. There has been an understandable focus on the well-trod issues, such as health costs, access, and the specifics of a number of health reform plans. Let me offer one more issue that I believe deserves [...]

PAIN
(Chicago, June 19 – June 21) I sit down at a circular table in the high-ceilinged meeting room and conversationally ask the two women already there what brought them to this three-day conference. The first replies that she had a daughter die from a medical mistake. The other, a nurse, lost a son to medical [...]