Tag: Service

Patients left to wait by Britain’s public health service turn to crowdfunding

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London
CNN
 — 

Holly Reeves has a medical condition where she struggles to swallow food, so doctors fitted the five-year old from Devon with a feeding tube.

But Holly has asthma and if she has a serious coughing episode the tube falls out – leading to her “starving to the point of collapse” with “repeated visits to hospitals,” her mother Amy Thomas told CNN.

The alternative is to have a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG), a flexible feeding tube which is fitted into the stomach – but her family say they were told by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) that the wait could be up to two years.

“If we had to wait another two years on an NHS waiting list – Holly might not have made it,” Thomas told CNN. So, her family decided to pursue private medical treatment instead and have exceeded their £5,000 target through crowdfunding website JustGiving.

Holly will now have the potentially life-saving operation next month.

A spokesperson for Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, said: “The NHS across the country is currently facing long waiting lists in many different specialties, and we are sorry that people in our care are waiting longer for certain procedures or treatments than we would like.”

And Holly is not alone, as an increasing amount of charitable donations online are paying for private medical care.

Figures obtained by CNN from JustGiving reveal that £52.1 million (about $64.7 million) was raised through its website for private healthcare in the UK over the past three years – £11.7 million more than in the preceding three years.

In the United States, people are no stranger to using charitable donations to pay for healthcare.

Unlike the universal, free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare provided through the NHS in the UK, the US system works off an insurance model. The standard of care is inextricably tied to your job status, leaving many unemployed and uninsured having to rely on charitable donations to pay for healthcare – or go without.

In the UK, most individuals do not have health insurance, according to Statista’s Consumer Insights. Instead, Brits use NHS services, which are paid for through general taxation and National Insurance contributions. The system is premised on the idea that everybody is entitled to equal and free access to healthcare – regardless of their income.

But following years of government austerity and with an aging population placing increasing

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A virtual health service for common conditions

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At Amazon, we want to make it dramatically easier for people to get and stay healthy. We’ve begun that journey with Amazon Pharmacy—where customers can get their medication delivered to their door conveniently—in just two days for Prime Members. We’ve also entered into an agreement to acquire One Medical, a human-centered and technology-powered provider of primary care. One Medical members benefit from a dedicated relationship with their provider, a friendly and convenient in-office experience, and ongoing engagement via a dedicated app.

Amazon Pharmacy and One Medical (once the deal closes) are two key ways we’re working to make care more convenient and accessible. But we also know that sometimes you just need a quick interaction with a clinician for a common health concern that can be easily addressed virtually. We’ve thought hard about how to improve this part of the experience as well. That’s why today we’re also introducing Amazon Clinic, a message-based virtual care service that connects customers with affordable virtual care options when and how they need it—at home, after dinner, at the grocery store, or on the go—for more than 20 common health conditions, such as allergies, acne, and hair loss.

We believe that improving both the occasional and ongoing engagement experience is necessary to making care dramatically better. We also believe that customers should have the agency to choose what works best for them. Amazon Clinic is just one of the ways we’re working to empower people to take control of their health by providing access to convenient, affordable care in partnership with trusted providers. Our new health care store lets customers choose from a network of leading telehealth providers based on their preferences. Every telehealth provider on Amazon Clinic has gone through rigorous clinical quality and customer experience evaluations by Amazon’s clinical leadership team.

Amazon Clinic is simple and easy to use. To get started, customers select their condition, then choose their preferred provider from a list of licensed and qualified telehealth providers. Next, they complete a short intake questionnaire. Customers and clinicians then directly connect through a secure message-based portal, giving customers the flexibility to message their clinician when it’s most convenient for them—anytime, anywhere. After the message-based consultation, the clinician will send a personalized treatment plan via the portal, including any necessary prescriptions to the customer’s preferred pharmacy.

Virtual care isn’t right for every problem—and if we think that may be the case,

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Amazon buys US healthcare service provider as it cements transfer into health care | Amazon

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Amazon will purchase the main treatment organization One Health-related in a offer valued about at $3.9bn, marking another enlargement for the retailer into health care products and services.

The Seattle-based mostly e-commerce big explained in a assertion Thursday it is getting Just one Healthcare for $18 a share in an all-income transaction. It’s one of Amazon’s most significant acquisitions, following its $13.7bn offer to invest in Total Foods in 2017 and its $8.5bn invest in of Hollywood studio MGM, which shut before this yr.

One Healthcare, whose mum or dad company is the San Francisco based 1Existence Health care, Inc, is a membership-dependent company that offers virtual treatment as effectively as in-particular person visits. It also functions with a lot more than 8,000 companies to present its well being positive aspects to staff members.

As of March, 1 Health care had about 767,000 customers and 188 professional medical places of work in 25 markets, in accordance to its initially-quarter earnings report, which also showed the corporation experienced incurred a net loss of $90.9m just after pulling in $254.1m in revenue. The total offer price introduced Thursday involves A single Medical’s personal debt.

Neil Lindsay, the senior vice president of Amazon Overall health Products and services, explained in a assertion the acquisition is geared towards reinventing the health care “experience“ for matters like booking an appointment and having excursions to the pharmacy.

“We appreciate inventing to make what really should be quick less complicated and we want to be a person of the organizations that allows considerably increase the health care practical experience more than the future many yrs,” Lindsay mentioned.

Overall, buyer demand for telemedicine and virtual overall health treatment care visits exploded through the Covid-19 pandemic. Healthcare bill payers like employers and insurers are also becoming more centered on bettering accessibility to client treatment and earning confident their patients remain tuned in to their wellness, see their medical practitioners on a regular basis and just take their prescriptions.

Healthcare fees have risen more quickly than wages and inflation for several years and depict a big price to businesses that offer protection. Businesses and insurers imagine that by connecting persons to common care, they can reduce pricey healthcare facility stays from taking place or keep serious conditions like diabetes from main to even bigger troubles.

For Amazon, the acquisition deepens its foray into healthcare providers, the newest market the firm

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Ingesting conditions a chance for armed service provider customers and veterans : Photographs

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There are threat factors for feeding on conditions that are one of a kind to army provider.

Al Tielemans/Sports activities Illustrated by using Getty Illustrations or photos


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Al Tielemans/Sporting activities Illustrated by means of Getty Visuals

There are chance elements for having ailments that are exceptional to military services provider.

Al Tielemans/Sports Illustrated by means of Getty Photos

Maritime veteran Chandler Rand has struggled with several consuming issues considering that she was a baby. Though she claims she’s healthful now, she describes her recovery as an ongoing system. She nevertheless has to struggle off damaging thoughts about her body picture and bodyweight.

“It really is in essence like strolling a tightrope,” Rand says.

In 2016, Rand was a Marine. She was efficiently handled for anorexia as a teen, but after boot camp, she started to binge try to eat and turned bulimic.

“I never think I saw that as part of my ingesting dysfunction at the time,” Rand suggests. “I imagine I just observed it as section of currently being a good Maritime.”

Eating Disorders Thrive In Anxious Times, And Pose A Lethal Threat

To Rand, that meant meeting the stringent armed service expectations for pounds and physique unwanted fat percentages. At the identical time, she was coping with a sexual assault that happened whilst she was in college.

She suggests the assault influenced her taking in habits.

“You just want to obsess about anything other than fear and worry or unhappiness and guilt,” she states. “So you check out to place this moral large floor on food and conditioning.”

Men and women like Rand, who produce dangerous having practices through their provider, have not received a lot consideration from the Division of Protection or Veterans Affairs. But a analyze amid Iraq and Afghanistan war period veterans by the VA in Connecticut reveals that they experience bulimia at about a few situations the civilian price.

Some acquire taking in disorders when they are in the armed service, and other people grapple with eating routines soon after they’re out.

“I was seeing a very superior rate of binge feeding on dysfunction in the veteran population, but I also wanted to know about these other diseases,” suggests Robin Masheb, a investigation psychologist and the founder of the Veterans Initiative for Taking in and Pounds. It is just one of the several applications that reports feeding on diseases in veterans.

She suggests danger factors exceptional to military services go further

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Healthcare as a Public Service: Redesigning U.S. Healthcare with Health and Equity at the Center – Non Profit News

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“COMFORT” BY AMIR KHADAR/WWW.AMIRKHADAR.COM

Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.

This article is from the Winter 2021 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “We Thrive: Health for Justice, Justice for Health.”

What might healthcare look like if the profit motive were removed from the provision of care altogether? If healthcare were designed as a public service, what possibilities would exist for health equity, health system resilience, and reduced costs? The multiple crises of our current healthcare sector, laid bare by COVID-19, should move us to ask deeper questions about how our investments into the healthcare sector should be employed to maximize the health and well-being of our people and economy.

There are, sadly, few bright spots in a system that has allowed more than one in five hundred Americans to die due to COVID-19.1 Many readers may be surprised to learn that one of the few highlights in healthcare performance during the pandemic comes not from the nation’s richest hospital systems or biggest names in medicine but from the poorly understood and often maligned Veterans Health Administration (VHA).

The VHA—the country’s only fully public, integrated healthcare system—has a lot to tell us about how a national healthcare service for the United States might operate, and not just for its performance amid COVID-19. Indeed, combined with other public healthcare institutions, it could prove to be a critical institution to achieving health justice.

While the new is often fetishized, sometimes the most effective and feasible models are not new; they just need dusting off so that we can see them for what they are. Healthcare as a public service is one such model, and the VHA could help jump-start a revival of this model today.

 

U.S. Healthcare in Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has brutally exposed the weaknesses of the nation’s fragmented, inequitable, and extraordinarily expensive healthcare system. In the early days of the pandemic, as revenue from elective procedures cratered, many health systems furloughed staff, cut their hours, or reduced pay, even as demand for emergency care due to COVID-19 exploded. Many hospitals resorted to rationing care, and some shuttered altogether. Increasingly, we are witnessing the collapse of U.S. healthcare, as multiple crises—including lack of rural hospitals, shortages of physicians, and overpriced treatments—collide.2

Hard though it may be to believe, today healthcare consumes almost one fifth of the entire

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