Latest news with #healthworkers
Globe and Mail
4 days ago
- Health
- Globe and Mail
B.C. launches $5-million ad campaign to recruit American doctors, nurses
British Columbia has launched a six-week, $5-million campaign of targeted advertisements to recruit doctors and nurses in the United States, citing 'chaos' under the Trump administration to lure them north. The Ministry of Health said the campaign launched on Monday was being shown on thousands of advertising screens in Washington, Oregon and California, at locations within a 16-kilometre radius of health care facilities, as well as on podcasts and Netflix shows. B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne said at a news conference it was a step B.C. needed to 'take right now' to attract physicians, nurses and other health care workers, and the province would do everything in its power to ease their transition. 'This will help supercharge our overall recruitment campaign to attract U.S. health care workers to B.C.,' she said. Opinion: How to win a trade war Fentanyl czar focused on combatting opioid trade, despite tariff distraction In one of the ads, a disgruntled-looking woman in hospital scrubs listens to 'more news from Washington' before the scene cuts to outdoor views of British Columbia, and listeners are urged to 'follow your heart' to the province. Osborne said the campaign was expected to reach about 250,000 health care workers. She said B.C. was 'taking advantage of the uncertainty and chaos' in the United States after the election of President Donald Trump by reaching out to health workers who shared the values of the province's health care system. One ad says recruits can 'practice evidence-based care' in B.C., while another promises 'universal health care that puts people first.' Looming over these efforts is the question of whether B.C.'s public single-payer system offers sufficient financial incentives. Osborne said it was difficult to directly compare physician salaries in B.C. with those in the United States. 'But I can say that with some of the recent changes we've made, and how we pay family doctors, we know that we have competitive salaries,' she said. 'We also know that we offer very competitive salaries for nursing. We offer some of the highest nursing wages in Canada. We also know, though, that doctors are not just motivated by dollars and cents.' Osborne said nearly 1,600 health care providers had already expressed an interest in moving to B.C. even before the ads launched. These included 700 doctors and 500 nurses, but she could not say how many had made it to B.C. 'We're going to do everything we can to attract as many physicians and nurses as possible,' she said without giving a specific target number. 'Ultimately, the success is measured by what people experience in their communities,' she added. She said B.C. would eventually expand international recruitment to other jurisdictions, likening the process to hitting a target. 'We've got the U.S. right in the centre, the bull's eye, and then right outside in the next rings, are countries like the United Kingdom,' she said. 'That's where we'll be focusing our efforts next.'
BBC News
23-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Covid 2020: An intimate look at health worker's lives amid a global crisis
Health worker David Collyer wanted to shoot a documentary photography project on the last years of the Welsh hospital he worked in. Then Covid-19 appeared. On 6 May 2020, a strangely atmospheric picture graced the front page of the British daily newspaper The Guardian. The picture showed a woman in hospital scrubs laughing as she was handed a birthday cake. In the background, another woman could be seen laughing too. The scene seemed to have been lit, mostly, by the flaming candles on top of the cake. The image was unlike most other front-page pictures The Guardian usually ran: it was black and white, for starters. The characteristic grain hinted that it had been taken on film instead of a digital sensor. And it was taken not by a professional news photographer, but by a fellow health worker, joining in the birthday celebrations as a brief respite from working on the frontlines of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. David Collyer took this picture in the first few months of 2020, on shift for his job as an operating department practitioner (or surgical nurse) at the Nevill Hall Hospital in Abergavenny in Wales. As the hospital began to be inundated with Covid-19 patients in the first wave of the pandemic, Collyer decided to document what he and his colleagues were witnessing, all captured on a small 35mm film camera. Documenting the day-to-day experience of the hospital's theatre staff was a project that Collyer had long considered. "The Trust that I worked for had built a big new central hospital which opened during Covid," Collyer says. "I'd already thought about doing this project to sort of document the last couple of years of Nevill Hall. And then, of course, Covid came along. "That was the catalyst that made me actually get the camera and say, right, we need to do this now. It was a project that was already planned, and it just so happened that Covid turned into the project." Collyer first became aware of the impending pandemic long before the hospital was inundated with patients. "I started seeing the images coming in on the news from Italy, really, that's, that's what was the real eye opener," he says. "We were suddenly aware that something was doing the rounds. And then, of course, you started to get these news stories coming onto the 10 O'Clock News at night." As government scientists started to warn of Covid-19's arrival in the UK, Nevill Hall's staff started making crisis plans. "Then when we stopped elective procedures, and, you know, we're only doing emergency procedures. And then there was this kind of lull where we didn't really know what was happening," he says. "It was a bit like a tsunami. You know it's coming. You've been told it's coming, and you're standing on the shore, you can kind of hear it, and you can see it… you're looking at the reports around the world, but you don't know when it's going to make landfall. "The hospital prepared by setting up an Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU) which would offer initial care to suspected Covid cases. Then all of a sudden, the first one [Covid-19 case] came through the door, and then the second one came through the door, and then, you know, one ITU space got turned into two, got turned into three. Every patient that came into theatre had to be treated as if they were Covid-positive." Collyer says this meant the hospital's frontline staff had to wear full personal protective equipment (PPE), as well as ventilating the air every 20 minutes. For around two months, Collyer took his camera – a tiny 1980s model called the Olympus XA3 – into work for each shift. The camera was small enough to keep on a neck strap under his scrubs when not in use, and its shutter is very quiet. Collyer chose not to use flash, either, giving his images a grainier look. None of his pictures were of the many patients receiving care at Nevill Hall – partly for privacy reasons, but also that was the focus of so much photojournalism being produced across the world. Collyer instead trained his camera on the hospital staff. He captured colleagues snatching a few minutes respite in-between cases, extreme tiredness etched on their faces, or sitting slumped on chairs and wheelchairs in staff rooms after long and hectic shifts. In one picture, a nurse ties back a colleague's hair in a break room; in another, a visibly exhausted health worker sits slumped against the wall, still wearing his PPE and protective visor. They are moments of calm away from the biggest health crisis the world had seen in decades. "If I'd wandered around with a DSLR, putting it in people's faces, then people act in a very, very different way. I've got something that's smaller than the palm of my hand, and it's literally just click, click, click. It lends a different sort of nuance to the to the body of work," Collyer says. The Guardian chose to run a photo essay of his work, and it was the image of his colleague's Lauri's shift-time 40th-birthday celebration that made it to the front page. "She'd chosen to come into work on her 40th birthday, when she could have got it off, to deal with this crisis," Collyer says, adding that NHS teams often bond over shared experience in difficult times. "In order to be able to get through something like Covid, you have to have ways of finding joy in the situation, as well as amongst yourself as a group of people. And to me, that photo really sums that up. Because if you don't have moments like that, then you can't really deal with what you see on a daily basis. "We all, in the courses of our career, have seen tragic events and people dying, but there was the element of the unknown coming with it as well. And was it going to get us?" The single location – the interior of Nevill Hall Hospital – also shows the monotony many of the health workers had to contend with. "What [photographer] Peter Dench said about my photos at the time was that they had this feeling of claustrophobia about them… that really resonated about what Covid was like. There was this incredible feeling of claustrophobia, not just because of the PPE that we were wearing, which was a lot more severe than we were used to. Because you were kind of stuck in the hospital a lot of time, you couldn't go home. You had to shower after every case, you know, you had to decontaminate yourself on the way in and out… so it was a pretty tough time. "On top of this, we were watching people die and, and we were hearing reports coming in from around the country of NHS workers that were dying as well, you know. I've got a friend who's a respiratory professor up in Leeds, and he lost five colleagues," Collyer says. "I wanted to sort of look at how we bonded as a team… because I didn't shoot patients, you almost take Covid out of the picture. It was really looking at how a team worked together under a stressful situation, and that stressful situation happened to be Covid. More like this:• Covid 2020: The body in the bed• Covid 2020: A landmark without a crowd• Covid-19: What happened to the countries that didn't lock down? "I always say that to work in theatres, you need to have a strong stomach and a dark sense of humour… you've got to be able to find moments of humour and joy in the darkest moments to do the job. That's really what I wanted to capture. Not just people with thousand-yard stare on, looking absolutely shellshocked, knackered at eight o'clock in the morning. But I wanted to capture those moments of human interaction and warmth that really sort of held us together as a team." Such was the reception of Collyer's work that his pictures were turned into a book called All in a Day's Work, which raised money for NHS charities. The project earned him the Royal Photographic Society's documentary photographer of the year in 2021. But the photographer's jubilation had to be put on hold: just weeks later he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. (He has since made a full recovery.) "All of a sudden, I'm the patient in the system, and I'm being shielded in a private hospital as an NHS patient, because that's where all of the cancer cases in South Wales are going to shield them from Covid," he says. Covid-19 was still widespread, and Collyer's cancer prognosis made contracting it potentially much more serious. "I just remember coming home from the operation, and I was sat on the sofa, and I suddenly I started getting the rigors, which is like where your body suddenly starts dramatically shivering, you're spiking a temperature. I was terrified that I was going to have to go back into hospital." --
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Pay awards for health workers signed off by minister
The health minister has signed off on pay awards of around £200 million for health workers in Northern Ireland, but the money still has to be found to pay Pay Review Body (PRB) which proposes pay increases for health workers in Northern Ireland, England and Wales has recommended a 3.6 per cent rise for Agenda for Change contract staff for includes nurses, health visitors, midwives, ambulance staff, porters and and dentists have been offered 4% awards, with senior NHS managers being offered 3.25%. The PRB said the UK Government and the Department of Health Northern Ireland had told them that 2.8% was in budget for a pay on Thursday, the UK government accepted their health minister said he wanted to action the pay awards in full as soon as this year's awards were made public. 'I want to pay the workers' Mike Nesbitt said it was "not acceptable" last year that health workers had to wait until the "12th and final month of the financial year to get confirmation that they were going get their pay parity recommendation implemented".He said he was determined it would be the last said that, after signing off on the pay awards, he would be taking it to the permanent secretary, but it would be inevitable he would be told the Department of Health could not afford said his ministerial direction would likely be to go to the finance minister, "who may choose to implement it or pass it on to the executive for final decision"."I want to pay the workers because the workforce keeps the health service running."You need buildings, you need beds, you need equipment, you need medicine."All that is nothing if you don't have the workforce," he said. Stormont merry-go-round Analysis - Jayne McCormack BBC News NI Political CorrespondentSo begins another Stormont merry-go-round over Nesbitt has made it clear he doesn't want to have to find this funding in tranches, which if history is anything to go by, could take many he has chosen to issue what's called a ministerial direction - a formal instruction telling his department to proceed with this spending - even though he already knows the money isn't has effectively thrown the ball into the executive's court to help find the money or risk further angering health denied he was trying to "spread the blame around", insisting he is doing what he thinks is right, but it's bound to increase tensions around the executive table over tight finances. Health pay is a devolved matter in Northern recent years health workers have gone on strike to fight for pay parity with their colleagues in the rest of the said he was doing what he thinks is right, "which is to honour the pay parity agreements".He said the health service has a shortfall of more than £600 million because of the £200 million of pressures these pay awards add to the he hopes the NI Executive will join him in recognising that those who deliver healthcare care here "deserve the pay that they are recommended by these national bodies". 'Insufficient' Dr Alan Stout from the British Medical Association (BMA) said the recommendation from the Doctors' and Dentists' Pay Review body (DDRB) of a 4% pay uplift "does not sufficiently address the years of pay erosion and will be deeply disappointing for doctors right across Northern Ireland"."While we welcome the news that the minister intends to pay this in full, his comments are some cause for concern in terms of the time it may take to get a final decision on making the award, delaying again the actual uplift for members," he added.
Associated Press
22-05-2025
- Health
- Associated Press
Agnes' Story: Leading Nutrition Change in Tanzania's Health System
Published by Action Against Hunger. Contact [email protected] for inquiries. For over two decades, Agnes Jairo has worked as a nurse at Mgandu Dispensary in rural Tanzania. She trained many of her colleagues when they first arrived at the dispensary as new health workers, and they still admire her expertise. Agnes' passion for nursing was ignited when she observed the care provided by a nurse during a hospital visit with her mother at a young age. She knew then that she wanted to dedicate her life to healing others and improving the wellbeing of her community. The Nutrition Crisis in Tanzania Only about 19% of children in Tanzania have the World Health Organization's outlined Minimum Diet Diversity for children ages 6-23 months, which recommends a minimum of five food groups a day to achieve nutritional health. 'The majority of the illnesses we receive here are caused by poor nutrition, especially among children under five years,' Agnes notes. According to Tanzania's 2022 Demographic and Health Survey, 30% of children in Tanzania suffer from stunting, which is when a child has a low height for their age due to having suboptimal nutrition, and 12% are underweight. This is a significant improvement from 2010, when 42% of children were stunted and 15% were underweight, but it still means that thousands of children are being subjected to the long-term, harmful effects of malnutrition like: A child's nutritional health is closely related to that of its mother's, but women in Tanzania are highly vulnerable to malnutrition themselves. Only 18% of women in rural areas achieve the minimum dietary diversity due to factors such as limited access to resources, poverty, and harmful social norms. This is not just the case in Tanzania; roughly one in four women globally suffer from undernutrition according to the Gender Nutrition Gap Report. Improving women's nutrition is essential for them to thrive and reach their full potential. When a woman is malnourished, pregnancy can aggravate existing nutritional challenges. Pregnancy increases the demand for critical micronutrients, which can be especially difficult to meet in conditions of food insecurity. UNICEF warns that deficiencies in certain nutrients like zinc, iodine, or calcium while pregnant lead to higher risks of complications such as pre-eclampsia or death during childbirth, and babies have a higher chance of being stillborn, having a low birthweight, or facing a developmental delay. Anemia, for example, is most commonly caused by an iron deficiency and is responsible for about 14.5% of maternal deaths in Tanzania each year. A 2021 study, High Burden of Anemia Among Pregnant Women in Tanzania: a Call to Address Its Determinants, evaluated approximately 23,200 women in Tanzania found that over 57% of pregnant women were afflicted with anemia, putting both mother and baby at risk. In addition to the nutritional challenges of pregnancy, women are particularly vulnerable to malnutrition for a wide variety of socioeconomic factors. Some of the main contributors to poor nutrition outcomes in Tanzania include discriminatory attitudes of health providers, inadequate crop management, poor agricultural and hygiene practices, and household food insecurity. These realities point to the need for a gender-sensitive transformation of nutrition services in Tanzania—a need that the Gender Equitable Nutrition (GENTU) project is addressing head-on. GENTU: A Gender-Responsive Approach to Nutrition In 2023, Action Against Hunger, supported by Global Affairs Canada, launched the Gender Equitable Nutrition (GENTU) project to reduce gender gaps and contribute to gender equality in Tanzania and Uganda, primarily in rural communities. In doing so, the GENTU project is also able to directly address the issue of malnutrition among women and children in Uganda and Tanzania, tackling the two innately intertwined issues simultaneously. The project began with a needs assessment for Maternal, Infant, Young Child, and Adolescent Nutrition (MIYCAN) in two target districts: Bahi and Itigi. The assessment suggested that an effective strategy to improve and sustain nutrition outcomes for the women, adolescent girls, and children in these districts would be to equip healthcare providers with the knowledge and skills needed to deliver gender-sensitive nutrition services. Thus, Action Against Hunger developed a plan to provide training and support that would transform the way nutritional interventions are approached. With this project, women become health changemakers in their communities. Health workers are upskilled to provide effective nutritional interventions, and mothers are armed with the education and skills to make dietary decisions for themselves and their children. Set to run for five years, the GENTU project will directly support 214,764 people (58% female), and indirectly support 92,105 people (37% female) in highly at-risk, rural communities, taking a multi-sectoral approach to holistically address malnutrition and its root causes. Building Capacity Through MIYCAN Training After years of seeing the harmful effects of malnutrition on the women and children in her community, Agnes was eager to join GENTU's Maternal, Infant, Young Child, and Adolescent Nutrition (MIYCAN) training program. Agnes underwent on-the-job mentorship and training on providing support to women and children dealing with nutritional challenges. She also learned about counseling caregivers of underweight children, pregnant women, and breastfeeding mothers. The training covered: 'Women and children in rural areas like Mgandu face significant vulnerabilities. Our clinic receives many patients, and we sometimes lack the resources to meet all their needs. These training sessions by GENTU have been invaluable, and I am grateful to be part of them,' said Agnes Jairo. Since completing the GENTU training, Agnes has applied her new skills in day-to-day clinical work. She provides support for pregnant women and mothers of underweight children, advises on breastfeeding practices, and monitors child growth using the knowledge and tools offered in the training. The Mgandu Dispensary where Agnes works provides antenatal services to approximately 1,160 children under five and 120 pregnant women monthly. Strengthening Systems for Long-Term Sustainability One of the key goals of the GENTU project is system-wide integration of nutrition services. By embedding training, supervision, and data tracking into existing healthcare systems, the project supports long-term sustainability beyond the life of the program. Health care providers like Agnes can train new health workers with the information and techniques learned in GENTU training, ensuring that best practices ripple across the system and improve nutrition interventions for years to come. Additionally, the longevity of GENTU's work is preserved through knowledge-sharing within the community. Action Against Hunger holds Community Awareness sessions in which people can learn nutritional information and practices to take home. For example, communities are taught about the importance of diet diversity in combatting malnutrition, so when faced with a decision between buying a larger quantity of one type of food or a smaller quantity of greater variety, they know that a greater variety is typically the better option for nutritional outcomes. Community members can integrate healthy nutritional practices into their homes, lead their own learning sessions, and disseminate information for generations to come. *** Action Against Hunger leads the global movement to end hunger. We innovate solutions, advocate for change, and reach 21 million people every year with proven hunger prevention and treatment programs. As a nonprofit that works across over 55 countries, our 8,900 dedicated staff members partner with communities to address the root causes of hunger, including climate change, conflict, inequity, and emergencies. We strive to create a world free from hunger, for everyone, for good. Visit 3BL Media to see more multimedia and stories from Action Against Hunger
Daily Mail
22-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Overweight people are publicly weighed and ordered to slim down under new rules in Turkey - with inspectors patrolling public spaces
Turkey has rolled out a nationwide scheme to stop and weigh people in public, with inspectors then telling them to slim down if they are found to be overweight. Health workers have been deployed across each of the country's 81 regions with weighing scales and tape measures as the drive to assess 10 million people by July 10 is underway. Passersby are stopped by medical examiners for spot body mass index (BMI) checks while walking through town squares, shopping centres and parks, and even as they prepare to board buses or head to football matches, according to reports. Speaking at a nursing conference last week, Turkey's Minister of Health Kemal Memişoğlu declared that '50 percent of our society is overweight.' He pointed to the various health risks associated with being overweight, telling the meeting: 'Being overweight means being sick, it means we will get sick in the future. 'Our young children are overweight, their body resistance is high and that's why they don't get sick, but when they start getting older, that weight will turn into joint and heart diseases.' But Memişoğlu was not spared the scales in Ankara last week - and was told by health officials that he was among the large proportion of the population counted as 'above normal weight'. 'Which dietitian should I go to?' he reportedly said afterwards, before adding in a follow-up post on Thursday: 'Turns out I'm a little over. It's up to me now, I'll be walking every day.' Pictures from around Turkey have shown people being guided onto weighing scales and having their height measured before their weight is calculated Another person who was checked by the inspectors, psychiatrist and academic Gökben Hızlı Sayar, wrote on X: 'I got caught in a fat checkpoint in Üsküdar Square. Luckily, they scolded me a little and let me go. 'Like drivers warning of speed traps, I tipped off three other chubby people heading that way. Solidarity, my fellow fat comrades!' Memişoğlu responded to people joking about the scheme on social media: 'Dear young people, I read what you write on social media. You are very entertaining, but the issue of being overweight is serious.' Pictures from around Turkey have shown people being guided onto weighing scales and having their height measured before their weight is calculated. The anti-obesity campaign, which is described by officials as a 'national fight' and is running under the tag line 'know your weight, live healthy,' began on May 10 and plans to survey one in eight Turks. People with a BMI over 25 are referred to state-run Family Health centres and Healthy Life centres, where they can receive free nutritional counseling and follow-up services. Turks have hit out at the measures, which many have argued point to the government being out of touch with the daily realities of soaring food prices and wage stagnation, and the impact this can have on healthy eating. The Erdogan government has also been criticised for the very public nature of the scheme, with Turks questioning why people need to be weighed in public. Meanwhile an article in Turkish daily newspaper Evrensel pointed out that the scheme was rolled out in the same week that a new generation weight loss injection was launched in Turkey - something it labelled 'a 'strange' coincidence'. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated in 2023 that some 30 per cent of Turkish people are obese. Health experts warned earlier this year that a BMI score is not 'nuanced' enough to measure obesity, with more assessments needed before someone is told they are obese. The new Lancet Commission of more than 50 experts from around the world argued that doctors should only diagnose patients as clinically obese if they have illnesses directly caused by obesity alone, such as type 2 diabetes. BMI first gained popularity in the 1970s as a way of judging body fat. A healthy BMI is typically measured between 18.5 and 25. Anything under 18.5 is considered underweight. BMIs between 25 and 29.9 fall into overweight territory, and above 30 is considered obese. It is useful for tracking population trends in body weight, but has well-known limitations when applied to individuals, Dr Arya Sharma, an obesity researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada, told Live Science. For example, many professional athletes qualify as overweight or obese based on solely their BMI. But they have much more muscle mass, which weighs proportionally more than fat.
