This is the first in a series of articles reported in Northwest Georgia, an area rich in stories about unmet health needs and about people and programs making a difference. Georgia Health News and the health and medical journalism graduate program at UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication collaborated to produce this series, made possible…
Another rural hospital is closing its doors in Georgia. Jenkins (County) Medical Center in Millen will close in June, and its services will merge with a hospital in Sylvania in neighboring Screven County, the hospitals’ owner, Optim Health System, said Tuesday. The two hospitals are about 20 miles from each other in east Georgia, roughly…
Emily Ferguson is happy when she looks in the mirror and recognizes herself, a slender and athletic woman with medium blonde hair cut at shoulder length. If you want to copy hairstyle but you know your hair needs a little trimming, you must first avail tools such as Japan Scissors USA. And she’s relieved that…
“I think in every job there are hidden risks,” said Paige Cummings, director of the Athens Nurses Clinic. These are perils “that people in that area are very aware of and people on the outside may not be.” That’s certainly true of nursing. In 2015, about five of every 1,000 registered nurses missed work due…
Merry Fort, an RN who lives in Macon, has seen nursing shortages before. But, she says, “I’ve never seen it like this.” Fort works for a company that supplies “travel nurses’’ — hired to work in a specific location for a limited amount of time — and temp nurses to hospitals. A shortage of nurses…
The upcoming presidential change in Washington – not surprisingly – has brought an atmosphere of uncertainty to the Atlanta-based CDC. One big sign of an agency in transition is the upcoming departure of Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC. He will hand in his resignation on Jan. 20, the day Donald Trump is sworn in as…
Kay Rogers had been a bus driver in Georgia for several years when she had a heart attack in 2012. [vimeo]https://vimeo.com/185535964/ae8b1552a5[/vimeo]She was suffering from congestive heart failure, a chronic illness that meant eventually she couldn’t keep working the same number of hours. She was terminated from her job. Unemployed, uninsured and weakened by a chronic…
Among Republican ideas to transform the health care system is a proposal to allow health insurers to sell their policies across state lines. President-elect Donald Trump and Tom Price, the Georgia congressman picked by Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, have backed the proposal. They and other advocates see it as…
W.E. “Bubber” Wilkes spent 30 years raising turkeys and then beef cattle, 24 years on the Oconee County Commission, and five years working security at Athens Regional Hospital. And January will mark his first year on home dialysis for kidney failure. Wilkes was born with only one kidney, but it was larger than normal and functioned…
Georgia’s physicians are slightly more pessimistic about the future of medicine than their counterparts nationally, a recent survey found. Two of three Georgia doctors — 66.8 percent — said they were somewhat negative/pessimistic or very negative/pessimistic about medicine’s future, versus 62.8 percent of doctors nationally, according to a survey of more than 17,000 physicians around…