Blake Farmer
Person Page
-
More and more hospitals are contracting with private companies to run their emergency departments. To save money, many are increasingly relying on nurses and physician assistants instead of doctors.
-
Increasingly, private equity firms shape staffing decisions at hospital emergency rooms, research shows. One apparent effect: Hiring fewer doctors and more health care practitioners who earn far less.
-
Clinics that care for long COVID patients are wrestling with how to handle a condition that is still poorly understood and has no widely accepted treatments.
-
Activists are campaigning against clinics that offer care for transgender teenagers. Some families worry that will only fuel efforts to ban gender-affirming care in their state.
-
When rural hospitals go out of business, they're frequently gone for good. But now, some comebacks are a welcome sign for communities that have been without easy access to health care.
-
Some rural hospitals are in such bad shape, they're selling for next to nothing. One company is snapping several distressed or closed hospitals in rural Tennessee, hoping to turn a profit.
-
Festival promoters are allowing lifesaving medication as fentanyl deaths surge, but volunteers are often left to distribute it, and more controversial forms of harm reduction aren't openly allowed.
-
Reproductive rights proponents worry about the risk of counseling those who seek medication abortions, though they've published online support techniques and guides for safe use of the drugs.
-
State medical boards have an obligation to investigate complaints about doctors, such as those who spread COVIC misinformation. But in Tennessee and other states, lawmakers are saying 'not so fast'
-
Black patients and their families are less likely to sign up for end-of-life comfort care. To reach them, investors are starting hospice agencies run by people who look like the patients they serve.
-
With few options for health care in their rural community, a Tennessee couple's experience with one outrageous bill could have led to a deadly delay when they needed help the most.
-
Hospitals and doctors are facing more demands for ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment, despite no proof it works. In some Republican-dominated states, lawmakers and attorney generals are weighing in.