To save lives, midwives mix Mayan heritage with Western medicine

More than five million Americans have Alzheimer’s or similar illnesses, and that number is growing as the population ages - without any immediate prospect of a cure, advocacy groups have begun promoting ways to offer people with dementia a comfortable decline instead of imposing on them a medical model of care, which seeks to defer death through escalating interventions. An Arizona nursing home offers new ways to care for people with dementia.

Thousands of clinics in America have no doctors. The primary care providers are nurse-practitioners – and their results are as good or better than that of the doctors.

An estimated 6,000 "never events" — egregious errors like operations on the wrong limb or instruments left inside a surgical wound — occur every month among Medicare patients alone. Hospitals across the country are revamping their care programs to stop preventable injuries and deaths.

In Montana, schools and hospitals are in desperate need of teachers and nurses as brain drain leads young people to leave the state. In response, the state is working with Guardian Healthcare Providers to employ foreign nurses, mostly from the Philippines. Foreign teachers are also coming to Montana, and they need to meet clear certification requirements to be able to teach. Cut Bank, Montana residents are welcoming the foreign workers into their communities.

In South Africa, public health nurses have a tendency to act more like a parent than a nurse when teenage girls visit the clinic to be tested for HIV, ask for birth control or get antiretroviral treatment. To change this reputation and behavior, Makhulu Media and the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation collaborated to make a virtual reality film that shows the nurses how their behavior is often interpreted by the patient.

In Kentucky, sexual assault nurse examiners (SANE) are often the frontline responders for survivors of a sexual assault, but have yet to be available in every hospital. Too often, women are turned away because of an absence of SANE nurses, which tend to be in more metro areas. Communities that do have access to the specialized services see an increase in rape prosecutions and a decrease in long term health concerns for these women, but making sure such services are statewide has proved economically challenging.

Dementia units and long-term care homes for the elderly are often desolate and lonely places, with harried workers attempting to meet the needs of their patients while also meeting government-set metrics of success. For families and individuals, it can be difficult to imagine a better way. However, a pilot program in Canada called the Butterfly room is showing that dedicated efforts to making long-term care homes a vibrant and loving place for someone's last days has positive impacts for everyone - and is worth a government investment do right across the country.

There are many things to consider when it comes to the quality of life and psychological needs of people living with disabilities, but one need rarely remembered is their sexuality. A Czech organization called Freya trains people to be sexual assistants who work with people with a range of abilities to learn how to become more comfortable with their own bodies and sexuality and physical tactics to help them do so. The service offers them a chance to experience basic human pleasures, and many testify to how much it has shaped their self-esteem and psychological health.

Liquid morphine offers a low-tech, low-dose alternative to other opioids when it comes to pain management. Uganda has taken steps to increase palliative care by allowing nurses to prescribe doses of morphine to patients, due to the shortage of doctors. The drug is affordable or free to some patients, and the low doses in liquid form prevents patients from developing addictions associated with other opioid drugs.

In recent years, there has been a decrease in Canadian organ donors but a comprehensive effort by an Ontario hospital is changing that narrative. From increased specialized training for nurses to adding a donation coordinator to morning rounds, Sudbury’s Health Sciences North has become a model for increasing donor rates.