More than most tragedies, suicide should be preventable. But thwarting it can prove terribly difficult as the causes and warning signs often go unrecognized. In fact, the rate of suicides has gone up recently, and though the increase in Georgia is not as great as the one nationwide, it is cause for alarm.
September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. In a new GHN Commentary, the head of the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities looks at ways to reverse the alarming trend. While Commissioner Judy Fitzgerald discusses the state’s broad-based effort to address the surge in suicide, ...
Nonprofit hospitals in Georgia soon will face tough new financial transparency rules, under a law passed earlier this year by the General Assembly.
The new law will require disclosure of data on executives’ compensation and the financial holdings of hospitals. The state is developing regulations on how it will be implemented, and there is considerable anxiety among Georgia hospital executives as they await the deadlines and rules about the disclosures.
Representatives of the hospital industry, citing the administrative burden and “vague” terminology in the law, suggested their own set of regulations in July “to implement the law in ...
Georgia’s uninsured rate rose slightly in 2018, to 13.7 percent, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
That gives Georgia the nation’s third-highest rate of people without health insurance. The state trails only Texas and Oklahoma.
Georgia had the fourth-highest percentage in 2017.
The national uninsured rate also rose in 2018, from 7.9 percent of Americans, or 25.6 million, to 8.5 percent, or 27.5 million, the Census Bureau said.
The Georgia increase is small enough not to be statistically significant, said Bill Custer, a health insurance expert at Georgia State University. But he added, ...
Brenda Goodman is a senior news writer for WebMD. Andy Miller is editor and CEO of Georgia Health News.
Updated Friday
A medical sterilization facility in metro Atlanta is shutting down operations until October as it undergoes construction to reduce emissions of a toxic gas.
Sterigenics said Friday that a September shutdown will expedite the improvements that the company has promised state officials that it will make to reduce ethylene oxide pollution.
The move comes as a coalition of the Cobb County, Smyrna and Atlanta governments has installed monitors around the Smyrna plant to begin testing airborne levels ...
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