Health Workers

In one of the largest expansions of health coverage to the uninsured, Los Angeles County is enrolling hundreds of thousands of residents in a publicly funded treatment program and setting the stage for the national healthcare overhaul. The county hopes to register as many as 550,000 patients and is assigning them to medical clinics for services at no cost to them. At the same time, the county is transforming its healthcare system to be less focused on acute care and more on primary care.

One-year-old Nelly Gomez refused to eat. Anything she swallowed, she immediately threw up. Thinking Nelly had indigestion, her parents took her to a nearby clinic in MacArthur Park. A blood test revealed a diagnosis that surprised and worried them: lead poisoning. "I didn't know what was going to happen," said her father, Nelson Gomez, an unemployed construction worker. "As her dad, I felt desperate. " Despite enormous strides over the last 20 years in protecting children from lead, which can cause irreversible nerve and brain damage, health workers still find unsafe levels in thousands of California youths every year.

If you are a teacher in debt, there's good news and bad news. There are literally dozens of programs that could potentially help wipe out your student loans. But most of them have narrow requirements that may lock you out. Just ask Troy Dale, a high school counselor from Ellis, Kan. He and his wife have $23,000 in student loans that they've been paying down for nearly a decade. At their current rate, they'll still be paying off their student debts when their oldest child enrolls in college.

In one of the largest expansions of health coverage to the uninsured, Los Angeles County is enrolling hundreds of thousands of residents in a publicly funded treatment program and setting the stage for the national healthcare overhaul. The county hopes to register as many as 550,000 patients and is assigning them to medical clinics for services at no cost to them. At the same time, the county is transforming its healthcare system to be less focused on acute care and more on primary care.

A county audit has found that Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center and the county Department of Health Services overpaid workers tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses, sick pay, disability pay and overtime, and need to do more to monitor over- and underpayments. The audit, which began two years ago and was released last week, found $85,000 in overpayments: At least 15 employees were overpaid $18,500 in bonuses. Twenty-three absent employees were overpaid $9,500 in bonuses.

Patient privacy laws may have restricted the way that doctors and hospitals can use your personal information, but they don't do much to stop conversations among health workers in hallways, elevators, waiting rooms and cafeterias. Those discussions make patients vulnerable to identity theft, discrimination or social stigma, says Maria Brann, lead author of a privacy study and now an assistant communication studies professor at West Virginia University.

Federal health officials issued new AIDS protection guidelines for health care workers Thursday, warning that all patients should be treated as potentially infected. In an 18-page guide for doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, the national Centers for Disease Control said appropriate precautions, such as use of gloves, masks and goggles, should be taken any time "contact with blood or other body fluids of any patient is anticipated."

Florida began vaccinating public health workers against smallpox Monday, hoping to create a core group that is immune to the disease should it be used by bioterrorists. Up to 2,000 state public health employees who would respond to such emergencies will be vaccinated, state officials said. In about two weeks, the vaccine will also be offered to about 30,000 hospital workers. Smallpox vaccinations have begun in 18 states, although the number of volunteers has been fairly low.

Fewer than half of 1% of health care workers mistakenly exposed to AIDS-tainted blood through cuts, needle wounds or other accidents become infected with the lethal virus, a new survey shows. The review, conducted at 335 hospitals across the United States, concludes that "the risk of HIV infection after exposure to the blood of a patient infected with HIV is low."

I rarely write letters because of a newspaper article. However, when I read about Dr. Cary Savitch's book on AIDS public policy, I felt compelled to add my voice to his campaign. As a nurse who volunteered to care for AIDS patients before the transmission route was identified, I understand the need as health-care workers to place our own health at risk. I will accept reasonable risk. I am unwilling to accept standing still if someone tries to shoot me. I find no difference if I am caring for a person who is HIV-positive and I do not know it. More than once that I know of, co-workers, through no fault of their own, were accidentally stuck with a sharp instrument, and the patient whose blood they were exposed to refused to be tested for HIV. The health-care workers undergo months of the agony of not knowing whether they have been exposed to HIV. Dr. Savitch is speaking for all of the doctors, nurses, housekeepers and aides working in health care in asking for universal testing.

Madison Elementary formed a "walking school bus" to get children - and their parents - to exercise. Good Stuff Restaurants started promoting to-go boxes so customers don't overeat. Crowne Plaza Hotel on Harbor Drive began opening some meetings with music and dancing. The cities of Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach are embarking on an ambitious experiment: improve the health of the entire region over a three-year period by transforming homes, workplaces and schools.

Products get knocked off all the time — designer bags, Oscar-night dresses, watches. But entire stores? That's something new, and that's why the Internet went crazy over a blogger's report that three fake Apple Inc. stores have popped up in her neighborhood in Kunming, China. In a post dated Wednesday on the blog BirdAbroad, an employee of an international public health organization said she was initially duped by the quality of the fake Apple store. It had the iconic clean wood interior, Apple branded posters on the walls and employees with those telltale blue polo shirts and chunky name tags hanging around their necks.

GRAND ISLE, LA. -- Ordinarily this time of year, Adam Trahan would be out on the Gulf of Mexico on a shrimp boat, trawling from South Pass to the Chandeleur Islands. Instead, last week he was trawling between the bar at Cisco's Hideaway on Oak Lane and Artie's out on the highway, fishing for Bud Light. "I look out there and I see my life ruined," Trahan, 53, said in his long Cajun drawl from the ocean-side deck at Artie's. "There ain't no shrimping, there ain't no crabbing, there ain't no oystering.

Can you imagine one adult taking care of 2,100 children? In California, that is what we ask of our roughly 3,000 credentialed school nurses who serve the state's 6.3 million public schoolchildren, some of whom have debilitating physical conditions that demand specialized healthcare. Our students with epilepsy who may need Diastat administered during a seizure are only one of the examples. However, the controversy surrounding who should be allowed to administer the drug to students in an emergency — the subject of Steve Lopez's May 26 column, "Down the Capitol rabbit hole" — illustrates the crisis that our students and our schools face with respect to providing care to our most fragile children.

A county audit has found that Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center and the county Department of Health Services overpaid workers tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses, sick pay, disability pay and overtime, and need to do more to monitor over- and underpayments. The audit, which began two years ago and was released last week, found $85,000 in overpayments: At least 15 employees were overpaid $18,500 in bonuses. Twenty-three absent employees were overpaid $9,500 in bonuses.

Federal officials have removed the management team overseeing a national database of dangerous or incompetent caregivers after questions were raised about its accuracy. The reassignments of the division director and four managers came in response to a joint ProPublica-Los Angeles Times story last month that found the repository was probably missing thousands of serious disciplinary cases against health providers. Congress ordered up the database more than 20 years ago. It was supposed to provide an alert system for hospitals, flagging them to disciplinary actions taken in any state against nurses, therapists, pharmacists and other licensed health professionals.

Seeking to match consolidation in the healthcare industry, the Service Employees International Union has engineered a merger of its own. Union representatives said Wednesday that they combined two locals to create a single statewide unit to represent hospital and nursing-home workers in California. The 130,000-member SEIU United Healthcare Workers West will be more effective at bargaining and working on political issues, said Sal Rosselli, president of the merged local.

In Iranian culture, both guest and host abide by the rules of taroof . Under this cultural creed, guests act as if they have no needs while their hosts try to figure out what their needs are. It's a sort of unspoken test of wills. So when Orange County mental health workers began seeing a rise in Iranian clients, taroof occasionally became a point of contention. Clients or their families would offer tea. If it was declined, coffee was served. Soon, the table was set with food.