Surrounded by poverty, urban hospitals reach out, By Michael Ollove, October 12, 2015, Stateline: “As a child, Bishop Douglas Miles heard the warnings about vans trolling East Baltimore streets, snatching up young African-Americans for medical experiments at nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital. Whether there was any truth behind those stories—Hopkins has always denied them—hardly mattered. The mythology lived on and, combined with the hospital’s very real development decisions, contributed to a persistent view of Hopkins as an imperious, menacing presence amid the largely poor and African-American neighborhoods surrounding it. ‘Hopkins was viewed with a great deal of suspicion and anger,’ said Miles, who graduated from the school in 1970 and is the bishop of Koinonia Baptist Church in northeast Baltimore. But now, Miles says, that perception could be changing. Johns Hopkins University and the Hopkins hospital and health system have launched an ambitious initiative to fill many more jobs with residents from distressed Baltimore neighborhoods, boost the use of minority contractors and vendors from those areas, and require their partners to follow their lead…”
Tag: Hospitals
Safety Net Clinics – Twin Cities, MN
Twin Cities safety net clinics call state’s rating system unfair, By Glenn Howatt, September 8, 2015, Star Tribune: “Safety net clinics, which serve the Twin Cities’ neediest neighborhoods, are arguing that Minnesota’s quality rating system unfairly penalizes them for serving a poorer, sicker population. The clinics are known for helping their patients not just with medical care, but with such basic needs as food, shelter and personal safety…”
Rural Hospitals
To survive, rural hospitals join forces, By Michael Ollove, August 17, 2015, Stateline: “Ask Sam Lindsey about the importance of Northern Cochise Community Hospital and he’ll give you a wry grin. You might as well be asking the 77-year-old city councilman to choose between playing pickup basketball—as he still does most Fridays—and being planted six feet under the Arizona dust. Lindsey believes he’s above ground, and still playing point guard down at the Mormon church, because of Northern Cochise. Last Christmas, he suffered a severe stroke in his home. He survived, he said, because his wife, Zenita, got him to the hospital within minutes. If it hadn’t been there, she would have had to drive him 85 miles to Tucson Medical Center. There are approximately 2,300 rural hospitals in the U.S., most of them concentrated in the Midwest and the South. For a variety of reasons, many of them are struggling to survive…”