For the most part it was business as usual at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas on Wednesday. Patients waited to be admitted, staffers walked briskly to their cars after their long, grueling shifts end. But there was an eerie quietness in the waiting rooms and admitting areas: Besides the…
Live updating of this blog has moved to: Ebola in Dallas: Day 3 September 20: Liberian national Thomas Eric Duncan arrives in Dallas from Monrovia, Liberia via Brussels. Duncan made an intervening stop at Dulles International Airport near Washington D.C.. September 26: Duncan first visits Texas Health Presbyterian. The AP…
UPDATE, 3:44 p.m.: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that a patient at Dallas’ Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital is the first case of Ebola confirmed in the United States. UPDATE, 5:13 p.m.: At a news conference in Atlanta, CDC Director Tom Frieden said federal, local and state health…
Vice magazine posted a video expose of crisis pregnancy centers to its YouTube channel earlier this week. Beyond the standard stuff — like anti-abortion activists admitting that the best crisis centers are ones that women think are abortion clinics — the video includes undercover footage from White Rose Women’s Center…
Before Parkland placed a patient named Todd Arko in what the feds described as “immediate jeopardy,” nearly costing the hospital its Medicaid funding, there was another, lesser-known hospital that the feds say also placed a patient in immediate jeopardy. Green Oaks is a private psychiatric hospital that in February 2013…
What’s that? Your arm just fell off? Naturally your first reaction might be something along the lines of, “Thank goodness I’m insured!” Your next reaction might be to scream in agony, but instead you might want to suck it up, save your breath and tell the ambulance driver not to…
Dallas County jurors last week spent about three hours deliberating before they awarded Martha Salazar $73 million, the largest amount of money any plaintiff has received so far in a vaginal mesh lawsuit. Most of the thousands of lawsuits that women have filed against Big Pharma over the devices are…
In the U.S., common knowledge — that’s a polite term for bigoted slander — says the English have the worst teeth in the world. That’s an unkind thing to say, and maybe not even true, as anyone who has traveled parts of the South can attest. So to soothe hurt…
Parkland has until November to fix its discharge policy and governing board, or the hospital will lose its Medicare funding, the Texas Department of State Health Services announced today. On the plus side, Parkland isn’t placing patients who dare visit the hospital in jeopardy anymore, according to the feds. “We…
The VA Hospital system has taken a beating in the last several months. Between the Arizona scandal unearthed this spring about veterans dying while waiting for care and continued reports of absurdly long wait times — this summer, the average veteran in Texas waited 60 days for an appointment, compared…
Todd Arko relapsed to using cocaine when he was still on probation for possessing the drug, then decided he would rather die than go back to jail. At the age of 53, he tried to hang himself. The rope broke, crushing his heels as he collapsed to the ground. Arko…
It’s a nice clinic, it really is. With more space and amenities, it’s a credit to the private donors who payed for it and continue to fuel Planned Parenthood’s response to the Texas Legislature’s crackdown on abortion. It’s just unnecessary. The large janitor’s closet, the backup generator, the locker rooms,…
Parkland’s psychiatric services division has been getting a hell of a lot of bad press lately, and it continues today, with reports that an elderly woman in Parkland’s psych wing ended up with broken bones after she claims she was forced out of her wheelchair. Earlier this week, the Center…
On September 1 the most stringent portion of House Bill 2, the anti-abortion legislation passed by the Texas Legislature last year, is scheduled to go into effect. Any healthcare clinic in the state that provides abortions will be required to be an ambulatory surgical center. If the rule takes effect,…
She was recovering in a postpartum room at Baylor University Medical Center this spring, exhausted from giving birth, when her husband gave her the good news. “We got the placenta,” he told her. “It’s in the cooler.” Now she just had to get it off the hospital property without being…
The homeless man identified only as Patient No. 5 was in a wheelchair, recovering from a suicide attempt and three broken bones when Parkland Memorial Hospital staff discharged him to a homeless shelter. He didn’t want to go. “The patient stated he did not feel safe going to the shelter…
A state study released yesterday found that from 2002 to 2011, the female breast cancer rate for Flower Mound residents was significantly higher than surrounding areas.Even better? Officials have no idea why. Last April, after allegations of a faulty previous study, the Department of State Health Services agreed to conduct…
The number of abortions being performed in Texas has dropped moderately, clinics offering abortions are vanishing rapidly and women seeking abortions must travel much farther to get an abortion, according to almost 18 months of data compiled by researchers looking at the effects of Texas’ passage of some of the…
In 2011, there were 44 abortion clinics in Texas. By September, providers expect that number to drop to somewhere around six. While big-name health organizations like Planned Parenthood are trying to open new clinics that comply with strict state laws or challenge lawmakers in court, a scrappy protest group Stop…
Forget the measles and chikungunya. If you’ve perused the Children’s Medical Center website in the last few weeks, you know that there’s another, more troubling outbreak threatening to undo us all: selfies. The hospital has devoted itself of late to the psychology of selfies. Doctors there are worried about their…
If you more than glance at the website for NuVision Pharmacy, you might start having second thoughts about having the Dallas-based company compound your pharmaceuticals. Why, you might wonder by looking at the home page, did quality testing have to be expanded to check for endotoxins? Why is the “about…
It all stems from a positive thing, really. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, more people have health insurance. A lot more. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, the state’s largest provider of health and accident insurance, picked up 700,000 subscribers during the ACA’s first enrollment period. In the months…
