HHS Secretary Azar says agency will comply with court-ordered deadline
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said his agency will use expanded resources, including DNA testing, to comply with a court-ordered deadline to reunite families separated at the border.
"Less than 3,000" separated children are in HHS custody, he said in a conference call with reporters on Thursday, declining to give a more specific figure. It was much higher than the figure he provided to a Congressional committee last week when Azar said 2,300 separated children were in the custody of HHS but said that number has now been reduced to 2,047.
Azar called the 3,000 figure an 'upper bound' of what the true number would actually be. He said the court order requiring the reunification of 'unaccompanied alien minors' is the reason for the discrepancy since he ordered a hand audit of the records of every child in HHS care—not just those transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) since the zero-tolerance policy was implemented May 6.
“HHS knows the identity and location of every minor in the care of our grantees. HHS is executing on our mission even with the constraint handed down by the courts.”
That has meant deploying more than 230 personnel, including 130 for the ORR and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. The National Disaster Medical System and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. were deployed and 100 case managers were also added to supplement case managers at the grantee facilities where the children are, Azar said.
Patients don’t care if doctors have tattoos or piercings, study finds
While patients prefer a doctor in a traditional white coat, they apparently don’t care if their doctors have tattoos or piercings.
A study recently published in the Emergency Medicine Journal involving 924 patients at a Pennsylvania trauma center found that tattoos or nontraditional piercings didn’t impact patients’ perceptions of doctors’ professionalism, competence, approachability or knowledge.
Seven emergency department doctors, both men and women, took part in the nine-month-long study. They variously wore fake body piercings or tattoos, both or neither in addition to their usual hospital scrubs
At least when it comes to emergency room physicians, patients didn’t rate doctors differently when they sported tattoos and piercings. (FierceHealthcare)
Paper: Methadone should be available in primary care offices, not just designated clinics
Primary care practices need to offer better access to medication-assisted treatment for people addicted to opioids, according to a series of papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Not enough doctors offer buprenorphine, a drug that can treat pain as well as addiction, and are barred from prescribing methadone, another opioid-based use for addiction treatment. With nearly 80% of Americans with opioid use disorder not receiving treatment, one answer is for physicians and policymakers to do more to make medication-assisted treatment available in primary care settings, the authors said.
“We believe the time has come to update laws that regulate the prescription of methadone in primary care in order to reduce barriers to access and extend the benefits of a proven, effective medication to people throughout the country,” the authors wrote.
Expanding access to methadone in primary care will require both legislation and enhanced training for physicians, incentives for prescribing medications and the integration of treatment into existing models of care, they added. (FierceHealthcare)