cover story one
Diplomatic Defiance
Tools for courageous leadership
By Wendy Dean, MDS
Last week, a colleague we’ll call Kelly told me that a loved one had recently undergone a procedure that had traumatized them both. Kelly grew up with a physician parent and was surrounded by physician family friends who were staunch patient advocates, trusted experts and community leaders. She is a non-physician clinician, who works on a medical team. She has had deep faith in health care for half a century, dutifully adhering to physician recommendations for everything from screening tests to surgery.
Cover story two
Integrating Physical and Behavioral Health Care: Solutions and benefits to the challenges
By Zomi Bloom, MBA, and Savanna Campbell, RN
Issues pertaining to mental health are a critical part of overall health care delivery and, conservatively, affect one out of every five of us, crossing every demographic and socioeconomic group equally. Patients don’t always realize they are experiencing mental distress – or if they are, they may not know where to get the care they need. At every point on the care delivery spectrum, from ED situations to annual check-ups, undiagnosed and untreated mental health conditions may play a vital role in patient outcomes. Quickly screening for and identifying such conditions has always been a complex challenge – from developing reliable assessment tools to incorporating them into best practice standards.
Health Care Architecture Honor Roll
By
Minnesota Physician Publishing
For the past 37 years, Minnesota Physician’s Health Care Architecture Honor Roll has recognized outstanding achievement in new facilities design. Despite unprecedented pressures on every element of health care, the fundamental process of delivering it requires a physical structure. Population growth and larger physical spaces to accommodate modern and constantly evolving technology, coupled with the natural process of buildings aging and becoming obsolete, requires ongoing new construction and remodeling. These considerations can be seen in many of the projects featured this year. Our thanks to all those who participated in the nomination and production process of presenting this year’s Honor Roll.
Interview
Redefining Whole-Woman Care
Suzin Cho, MD, is a practicing OB/GYN and the president of Almara Women’s Health
Public Health
Improving pediatric health: A new tool for school classrooms
By
Simone Hardeman-Jones and Laura Bakosh, PhD
Learned behavior begins very early in life and it has been fairly well proven that what you learn as a child will play a significant role in the behavior you model later in life. If, for example, a child is exposed to domestic violence and substance use disorders these things may become issues later in life. These issues may begin to manifest themselves very early in terms of distancing as a means of self-preservation, which can sometimes lead to attention deficit or obsessive-compulsive disorders. These concerns may be exacerbated by the ubiquitous bombardment of rapid-fire media, through cell phones, computers and many other sources. Everyone has been in a restaurant and seen some adorable young child walking around in a daze staring at a cell phone screen.
