Preparing for Joint Commission Surveys
By Brian Gallagher The overhead page repeats three times: “Gotham City Hospital would like to welcome the Joint Commission.” It’s the one page that can strike panic into even the most prepared organization. Team members run through the department making sure there is no food or drink visible. Cabinet doors and drawers are locked, wipe […]
The Rural Health Transformation Program: How It’s Changing Native and Rural Health
“Healthcare is broken.” We hear that all time, don’t we? And magic bullet solutions don’t exist anywhere except in someone’s imagination. So it’s understandable that there’s been a lot of excitement about the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program – a new source of federal funding for rural healthcare. States applied last fall for a […]
Observing Orange Shirt Day
September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation – colloquially known as Orange Shirt Day. It began in Canada but now we observe it in the U.S. too: a day to recognize the atrocities of the residential school system that devastated so many Indigenous communities. The U.S. government ran their boarding school program […]
Bringing Specialty Care to Indigenous Lands
Of all the challenges facing Indigenous health facilities, one of the biggest is the lack of specialty care in tribal health. Remote locations, high turnover, and budget shortfalls all lead to a common scenario: a facility without the right clinical expertise. Urban patients have their choice of 263 specialists for every 100,000 people; rural residents […]
How to Start a SANE Program in Your Indigenous Community
No one likes to think about violence. But if the unthinkable should happen – to ourselves, to our children, to an elderly parent in a care facility or a best friend in a volatile relationship – most of us assume that the right services will be available should we need them. That we can walk […]
Restoring Food Sovereignty for Native American Communities
Good health begins with nourishment, but food poverty is epic in the United States – and it’s an ongoing dilemma in Indigenous communities, where 1 in 4 Native Americans is food insecure. In Arizona’s Apache County, home to the Navajo Nation, the Zuni tribe, and the Fort Apache tribe, the rate is 30 percent. One […]
