Jean Makesh, CEO of Lantern assisted living facilities, says he meets folks with stories like these every day. It's their stories that inspired him to make some changes at Lantern. "I thought I knew a lot about elderly care. The more and more time I was spending with my clients, that's when I realized, 'Oh my god, I have no clue.'" A big believer in the idea that our environment has an enormous effect on us, he started thinking big — and way outside the box. "What if we design an environment...

On Monday evening, the U.S. Senate approved 99-1 the Opioid Crisis Response Act (OCRA) of 2018 (Senator Mike Lee, R-UT was the lone “no” vote). The rare, multi-committee, bipartisan bill includes significant provisions taken from or aligned with the goals of the Heitkamp-Durbin Trauma-Informed Care for Children and Families Act (S. 774) , including the creation of an interagency task force to identify trauma-informed best practices and grants for trauma-informed practices in schools. The...

Scientists recently completed a compelling experiment. They knew Hurricane Florence was barreling towards the United States’ East Coast. It was whipping up ferocious winds and the potential to drop enough rain to flood huge swaths of land. A warming climate can provoke more severe weather events. So this team decided to probe whether Earth’s climate fever might have intensified Florence. And their study’s finding: It did! This showed that Florence would end up being bigger than it would have...

“Health 1.0” has dramatically increased our lifespan. But it’s essentially run health care as a cottage industry without evidence-based guidelines, quality measures, or standardization. You mess with my physician autonomy and my patient’s autonomy at your peril. And volume trumps value. “Health 2.0” seeks to upgrade health care into a 21st –century industry. We no longer see health care as a fragmented, piecemeal jumble of individual patient-doctor interactions. It can actually be an...

Alice Lockridge, who spent a 30-year career training women to do physically demanding work, created the Women4Women initiative that brought them all together. “These women go to work every day and are told they are not as good, they are taking some man’s job, and ‘Why are they there?’ Subtle and straight to their faces, every day for their entire careers,” Lockridge says. With Women4Women, she says, “we made a place where they could come to work and share their skills and learn new skills in...

Hospital staff and physicians who are willing to explain, apologize for and resolve adverse medical events significantly reduce legal defense and liability costs, according to a study led by Dr. Florence R. LeCraw, an Atlanta anesthesiologist and adjunct professor at Georgia State University. LeCraw and economist Thomas Mroz of Georgia State’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, health economist Daniel Montanera from the J. Mack Robinson College of Business and medical and risk management...

Wildfires continue to rage across Northern California , affecting families, businesses and the entire state. Wildfires continue to rage across Northern California , affecting families, businesses and the entire state. To help families directly affected by the fires, a Facebook page was recently started where people affected by the Carr Fire could share their stories . According to local officials , the fire started after a horrible bit of bad luck: a trailer experienced a sudden flat tire -...

We are thrilled to announce the premiere of Wrestling Ghosts , a documentary about breaking the cycle of trauma, at the LA Film festival on Sept. 27th. “Incredible. Haunting and strange and beautiful and incredibly moving.” -Dan Cogan, Founder Impact Partners Wrestling Ghosts follows the epic inner journey of Kim, a young mother who, over two heartbreaking and inspiring years, battles the traumas from her past in order to create a new present and future for her and her family. In this...

With hundreds of area drivers giving rides at all times of the day, Uber can be a valuable tool in fighting human trafficking, an audience of largely criminal-justice professionals was told Wednesday. “We have a unique footprint in the communities where we operate,” said Dave Barmore, an Uber public policy manager based in the Washington, D.C., area. He was at the Modesto Police Department for a roundtable discussion on human trafficking hosted by U.S. Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock. In the...

On July 26th, the 28th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), CAP launched a major new project: the Disability Justice Initiative. The organization's plan is to include disability expertise in all internal conversations and projects, while modeling the necessity and utility of such inclusion to other groups that work in progressive spaces. The thinking behind the Disability Justice Initiative is that we can't address core progressive issues— poverty , health care , the...

There is a severe shortage of mental health workers across the U.S., but the problem is most pronounced in rural areas. There isn’t a single psychiatrist in 65 percent of nonmetropolitan counties , and almost half of those counties don’t have a psychologist, according to a report from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine released this month. But even when a rural area does have some mental health workers, they alone usually can’t address the entire population’s needs. Many residents...

Stanford Medicine hired Dr. Tait Shanafelt as chief wellness officer last year, not so much for the well-being of the patients — but of the physicians. An oncologist and hematologist by training, Shanafelt, 46, has become a national leader in the movement to end physician “burnout” — the cumulative effect of years of stress that can compromise patient care and cause doctors to leave medicine. After 12 years at the Mayo Clinic, Shanafelt now heads up Stanford’s WellMD Center , dedicated to...