"The IHS is responsible for more than 2 million Native Americans — a population that tends to need a lot of care, much of it specialized. Yet the IHS has been beset for years by underfunding and mismanagement," Sam Baker reports for Axios.
The first report analyzed and compared opioid prescribing and dispensing practices and cybersecurity at five IHS hospitals. Cybersecurity is important for protecting health information and keeping patients safer. The audit found that the hospitals often don't follow federal guidelines for dispensing opioids and don't fully use states' prescription drug monitoring programs to track opioid prescriptions. It also found that the IHS's decentralized IT management structure made it more vulnerable to hackers.
The second report is a case study of what went wrong at Rosebud Hospital, a perennially troubled hospital in South Dakota that was forced to shutter its emergency department for more than seven months starting in December 2015. Though IHS has made "significant improvements" at Rosebud since the ED reopened, the hospital continues to struggle with hiring adequate numbers of staffers and leadership.
The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls investigated Rosebud and another South Dakota IHS hospital in 2018. At Rosebud, they found that faulty temperature controls and mold on the walls sickened staff and patients, sometimes preventing staff from working. Dozens of patients died from errors at the hospitals. The federal government had mostly ignored bad conditions at the two hospitals or had failed to make meaningful change, the paper found.
Some tribes seem to do better funding their own hospitals, Baker notes, citing the example of the newly opened 20-bed Cherokee Indian Hospital in North Carolina, which seems to be performing well. But, Baker acknowledges, most tribes don't have access to the kind of financial resources the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians do; revenues from their casino mostly paid for the new hospital.
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2JOTzhl New reports say Indian Health Service still deeply troubled - Entrepreneur Generations
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