[Trust.org] The Syrian regime is conducting a campaign of unrelenting repression against people wounded in demonstrations and the medical workers trying to treat them, the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières MSF (Doctors Without Borders) said today.
While MSF cannot work directly in Syria, it has collected testimonies from wounded patients treated outside the country [...]

[Forbes]- Patients may think they’re going to a high quality hospital when in fact they’re not, according to an analysis of Medicare data appearing in USA Today by reporters Steve Sternberg and Christopher Schnaars. The USA Today website also contains an interactive graphic with a user-friendly interface to help readers compare hospital death rates and [...]

[WSJ]- The vast majority of U.S. hospitals have restricted the use of life-saving chemotherapy drugs and other critical-care medications in the past six months to cope with unprecedented shortages, according to a survey released Tuesday.
More than 80% of hospitals surveyed by the American Hospital Association reported they had to delay treatment, and nearly 70% [...]

[Post-Gazette] The boards that lead Highmark Inc. and West Penn Allegheny Health System have unanimously approved a “capital partnership” in which the area’s dominant health insurer will invest up to $475 million into the region’s second largest health system, including an up-front $50 million payment that will rescue Bloomfield’s West Penn Hospital from what would [...]

[Huffington Post]- I am a psychiatrist who has treated patients for over 35 years, run all varieties of psychiatric services and worked in city and state government. But I still cannot bear to read or hear a story of a fatal outcome for a person with a serious mental illness who dies from neglect or [...]

[USA Today]- An estimated 15,000 Medicare patients die each month in part because of care they receive in the hospital, says a government study released today.
The study is the first of its kind aimed at understanding “adverse events” in hospitals — essentially, any medical care that causes harm to a patient, according to the Department [...]

[Yahoo]- End-of-life care falls short of what the average person wants, says a new study that compares palliative care in the U.S. and Ontario.
While most patients prefer supportive measures that avoid a hospital death, U.S. patients received more chemotherapy. Ontario patients have more days in hospital, have more use of emergency rooms, and were much [...]

[nytimes] By the time she was 38, Dr. Desiree Pardi had become a leading practitioner in palliative care, one of the fastest-growing fields in medicine, counseling terminally ill patients on their choices.

She preached the gentle gospel of her profession, persuading patients to confront their illnesses and get their affairs in order and, above all, ensuring [...]

[Economist] MORE than a week after the earth convulsed beneath it, Haiti has still to plumb the depths of suffering and want. The numbers are still only more-or-less informed guesses, but their magnitude is grim: perhaps 200,000 killed, 250,000 more injured and some 3m in desperate need of help. The generosity of the world’s response [...]

Total health care expenses for Americans age 45 to 64 in 2006 ($370 billion) were about double the inflation-adjusted total for 1996 ($187 billion), according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. AHRQ’s study covers all Americans age 45 to 64 other than those residing in nursing homes [...]