A systems approach for resources management during the COVID-19 pandemic: Multi-agency perspectives from New England

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 209-223
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Cegan ◽  
Benjamin D. Trump ◽  
Matthew D. Joyner, PhD ◽  
Kaitlin M. Volk ◽  
Melissa A. Surette ◽  
...  

The emergence of COVID-19 in the United States has overwhelmed local hospitals, produced shortages in critical protective supplies for medical staff, and created backlogs in burials and cremations. Because systemic disruptions occur most acutely at a local scale, facilitating resource coordination across a broad region can assist local responses to COVID-19 surges. This article describes a structured systems approach for coordinating COVID-19 resource distribution across the six New England states of the United States. The framework combines modeling tools to anticipate resource shortages in medical supplies, personnel needs, and fatality management for individual states. The approach allows decision makers to understand the magnitude of local outbreaks and equitably allocate resources within a region based on the present and future needs. This model contributed to determining material distribution in New England as the 2020 COVID-19 surges unfolded in the spring and fall seasons. Using a systems analysis, the model demonstrates the translation of anticipated COVID-19 cases into resource demands to enable regional coordination of scarce resources.

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Melike Tokay-Ünal

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s involvement in foreign missions will continue with the driving force that led these women to leave the United States for far mission fields in the second part of the paper. This context will be exemplified with the story of a New England missionary wife. The analysis consists of the journal entries and letters of Seraphina Haynes Everett of Ottoman mission field. The writings of this woman from New England give detailed information about the spiritual voyage she was taking in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman lands. In her letters to the United States, Everett described two Ottoman cities, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople), and wrote about her impressions of Islam and Christianity as practiced in the Ottoman empire. Everett’s opinions of the Ottoman empire, which encouraged more American women to devote themselves to the education and to the evangelization of Armenian women of the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, conclude the paper.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-301
Author(s):  
PHILIP R. WYATT

To the Editor.— The report of the New England Regional Screening Program1 on neonatal hypothyroidism is a stunning illustration of the vulnerability of screening programs. It is unfortunate that this experience will probably be used as an argument to minimize the input of screening programs in the health care system in the United States. The report illustrates that, in addition to the 2% of the screened population that eluded the program, 14 infants with hypothyroidism escaped the full benefits of early detection and treatment.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Lykes ◽  
Erin McDonald ◽  
Cesar Boc

As the number of immigrants in the United States has increased dramatically in recent decades, so has the number of human rights violations against immigrants in the form of arrests without warrants, detention and deportation of parents without consideration of the well-being of their children, and incarceration without bail or the right to a public attorney. The Post-Deportation Human Rights Project (PDHRP) at Boston College was developed to investigate and respond to the legal and psychological effects of deportation policies on migrants living in or deported from the United States. This unique multidisciplinary project involves lawyers, social science faculty, and graduate students—all of whom are bilingual, one of whom is trilingual, and many of whom are bicultural—working together in partnership with local immigrant organizations to address the psychosocial impact of deportation on Latino and Maya families and communities. Our work includes psycho-educational and rights education workshops with immigrant parents and their children in southern New England as well as a cross-national project based in the U.S. and Guatemala supporting transnational families through participatory research, educational workshops, and legal resources.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽  
Manpreet Kaur Kang

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sasha Costanza-Chock ◽  
Chris Schweidler ◽  

This article summarizes key findings from a strengths and needs assessment of media work by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans*, Queer (LGBTQ) and Two-Spirit organizations in the United States, conducted in 2014–2015. This mixed-methods participatory research included a nationwide organizational survey with 231 respondents, 19 expert interviews, and a series of workshops with project partners and advisers. We found that despite scarce resources, many LGBTQ and Two-Spirit organizations have an intersectional analysis of linked systems of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other axes of identity and structural inequality. Many seek to do media work that develops the critical consciousness and leadership of their communities, create media in ways that are deeply accountable to their social base, use participatory approaches to media making, are strategic and cross-platform in their approach, and root their work in community action. We call this combination of characteristics transformative media organizing, and we believe it describes an emerging paradigm for social movement media practices in the current media landscape.


Author(s):  
David Schmit

Mind cure, or mental healing, was a late 19th-century American healing movement that extolled a metaphysical mind-over-matter approach to the treatment of illness. Emerging in New England in the mid-19th century out of a mix of mesmerism and metaphysical philosophies, due to its effectiveness, by the 1880s it achieved national recognition. Three individuals are credited with creating and popularizing mental (or metaphysical) healing: Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Warren Felt Evans, and Mary Baker Eddy. Mind cure was appealing because it helped treat ailments for which the medicines of the day were ineffective, especially problems with the “nerves.” Mental healers employed non-invasive mental and spiritual methods to treat ailing people, called mental therapeutics. As a practice and therapeutic philosophy, mind cure is historically noteworthy because it shaped the earliest forms of psychotherapy in the United States, advanced therapeutic work within the realm of mind-body medicine, birthed the influential New Thought movement, and helped set the stage for the beginnings of religious pluralism and the positive reception of Asian meditation teachers in the West.


Neurosurgery ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Motiwala ◽  
Michael J Herr ◽  
Sripraharsha S Jampana Raju ◽  
Jock Lillard ◽  
Sonia Ajmera ◽  
...  

Abstract BACKGROUND Established by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Open Payments Database (OPD) has reported industry payments to physicians since August 2013. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the frequency, type, and value of payments received by academic neurosurgeons in the United States over a 5-yr period (2014-2018). METHODS The OPD was queried for attending neurosurgeons from all neurosurgical training programs in the United States (n = 116). Information from the OPD was analyzed for the entire cohort as well as for comparative subgroup analyses, such as career stage, subspecialty, and geographic location. RESULTS Of all identified neurosurgeons, 1509 (95.0%) received some payment from industry between 2014 and 2018 for a total of 106 171 payments totaling $266 407 458.33. A bimodal distribution was observed for payment number and total value: 0 to 9 (n = 438) vs > 50 (n = 563) and 0-$1000 (n = 418) vs >$10 000 (n = 653), respectively. Royalty/License was the most common type of payment overall (59.6%; $158 723 550.57). The median number (40) and value ($8958.95) of payments were highest for mid-career surgeons. The South-Central region received the most money ($117 970 036.39) while New England received the greatest number of payments (29 423). Spine surgeons had the greatest median number (60) and dollar value ($20 551.27) of payments, while pediatric neurosurgeons received the least (8; $1108.29). Male neurosurgeons received a greater number (31) and value ($6395.80) of payments than their female counterparts (11, $1643.72). CONCLUSION From 2014 to 2018, payments to academic neurosurgeons have increased in number and value. Dollars received were dependent on geography, career stage, subspecialty and gender.


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