Credit: UT Southwestern Medical Center
DALLAS - April 28, 2021 - Depression screening among cancer patients improved by 40 percent to cover more than 90 percent of patients under a quality improvement program launched by a multidisciplinary team at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Southwestern Health Resources.
Cancer patients with depression are at an increased risk of mortality and suicide compared with those without depression. Although rates vary based on cancer type and stage, depression is estimated to affect 10 to 30 percent of patients with cancer compared with 7 to 8 percent of adults without a diagnosis or history of cancer, and impact both men and women equally.
COVID-19 has cast a spotlight on the shortages of mental health resources, especially for children and adolescents, but problems of accessing care have been increasing for years.
A new study, published this week in the journal Pediatrics, found children who visited emergency departments for mental health crises in 2015 were more likely to experience prolonged wait times for care than they were in the previous decade.
Researchers analyzed the length of stay for 36,215 patients ages 6 to 17 visiting a pediatric emergency department between 2005 and 2015 using the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. Researchers categorized visits into wait-time increments â more than six hours, more than 12 hours, or more than 24 hours. The length of stay for mental health visits were then compared with non-mental health ED visits.
Trauma centers introduced new processes to optimize use of personal protective equipment (PPE), ICU beds, ventilators, and other limited resources, according to the report by David Bar-Or, MD, of ION Research, Englewood, Colo., and colleagues. This information will be of value as trauma centers continue to respond and adapt to the pandemic, focusing on meeting the need for critical trauma services while protecting the health of trauma care teams, Dr. Bar-Or comments.
New processes to provide care at U.S. trauma centers, despite scarce resources
As the pandemic took hold in the spring of 2020, hospitals struggled to provide care not only for patients with COVID-19, but also for other groups of patients in need of care that couldn t be delayed. While the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma provided initial guidance on maintaining trauma center access, it was up to individual trauma centers to work out detailed processes for providing patient care.