N.S. hopes daycare will be key to keeping health-care system running
It’s suppertime at Health Park Early Learning Centre in Sydney, N.S., and six children are nibbling away on grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup.
Sarah Chow sits at a tiny table beside her 15-month-old daughter Mira, spending a few minutes together before leaving for work.
“She actually settled really well. She eats here, she loves to dance to music and they even got her to sleep,” Chow said, “which was really amazing, because usually I’m the only one successful at that.”
Chow is a piano teacher who works in the evenings, and her husband is an emergency-room doctor on a rotating shift at nearby Cape Breton Regional Hospital. They’ve had a hard time making their schedules line up with Mira’s care.
“Both of our families are in Ontario, so we don’t have grandparents close by to just kind of drop off the baby occasionally,” Chow said. “The first year was really 24/7.”
So when Health Park started offering round-the-clock child care for health-care workers in January, it was a blessing for the Chows.
“It’s really making our stay in Cape Breton a lot more positive, and I think it will probably be long term if we have that support,” Chow said.
What’s happening at Health Park is a pilot project aimed at tackling a pressing issue: Health-care workers across the country are reporting high levels of burnout, and many say child care with flexible hours would help them stay at work.
Whether 24/7 daycare for children of health-care workers is feasible is still an open question, but at least two provinces in Canada are trying to find out.
‘We are serious about the need’
So far the Sydney program has served 22 families
NWT child’s counselling file missing for years in ‘serious breach’
A child’s counselling file has been missing from an NWT health authority office for years after a departing counsellor tried to hand over paper records of their cases.
A report by the NWT’s privacy commissioner outlines a series of searches by staff that somehow kept turning up mislaid files every time, but never the file they were trying to find.
The report reveals sensitive counselling records were being kept in cloth reusable grocery bags – and even in a laptop bag “underneath a pile of personal items.”
The community in question isn’t revealed in the report. The health authority has said staff must now use locked boxes to transport files, rather than grocery bags, and a policy governing how clients’ information is moved is being finalized.
Privacy commissioner Andrew Fox’s report was filed in February this year and published online last week. It deals with a child and youth counselling file that was first declared missing on November 2, 2021.
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Such files normally contain a person’s name, birth date, counselling session notes and other sensitive information, although Fox said the NWT’s health authority doesn’t know for sure what was in this one. Staff reportedly said the file held more than five years of information and was “noticeably larger than the other files in the set.”
When a counsellor working with the child left their position in July 2021, they brought all their files to the office of the community’s mental health and addictions counsellor in two cloth grocery bags, both placed inside a bigger plastic bag. Later, in October that year once a new child and youth counsellor had started, the mental health and addictions counsellor took the bags to the new employee at the school.
Nobody ever made a list of which people’s files were inside the
Brandy Melville doc on HBO unveils racism, overconsumption and more
A new HBO Original documentary takes viewers inside the world of a fast fashion purveyor: controversial Italian fashion brand Brandy Melville.
“Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion” highlights the brand, which infamously makes clothes of only one size, and accusations of racism and misogyny in their stores by former employees, executives and fashion insiders.
The Italian retailer, founded in the early 1980s, has stores in over 15 countries. The brand rose in popularity in the U.S. among teen girls in the 2010s and with its “one size fits all” clothing, Brancy Melville is often linked to the “skinny aesthetic” promoted on social media sites like Tumblr at the time.
The documentary highlights how this marketing sexualized and promoted unrealistic beauty standards among young girls. At a point, the brand was worn and promoted by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner.
The documentary also looks into the company’s impact on the environment and promotion of overconsumption. Here’s what we learned.
Brandy Melville racism accusations: CEO accused of excluding Black customers
In 2021, an ex-store employee, Franco Sorgi, told Business Insider that Brandy Melville CEO Stephan Marsan told him he did not want overweight or Black people to wear his clothing. Sorgi opened the first Brandy Melville store in Canada in 2012 and, at one point, owned 11 locations.
Sorgi claimed Marsan said he wanted “good-looking rich little girls” as his customers, to sway the popular high school girls and increase sales.
Business Insider reported at the time that it spoke to more than two dozen current and former employees, who claimed the company’s employment practices were impacted by race. Its investigation also uncovered claims that Marsan and other executives regularly made jokes about Adolf Hitler in text messages, including an image that reportedly showed Marsan’s face edited
Protecting Our Planet | Johns Hopkins
You may be familiar with the adage that April showers bring May flowers. If that is the case, the flowers will be blooming in a spectacular way this April! The storms and torrential downpours that have blanketed this country so far this month seem fitting for “Earth Month.”
As the climate continues to warm, the risk to human health from extreme weather events will grow, exacerbating existing health-related inequities. There is indisputable evidence that weather events disproportionally impact older adults, children, low-income communities, and communities of color. Compared to more affluent communities and populations, these populations may not be able to prepare for, respond to, or deal with the impact of climate change on health. Specifically, because of the high cost of housing and structural barriers like racism, some populations may live in areas that are vulnerable to climate impacts, or have limited access to quality health care, or may not be able to easily to relocate after an extreme weather event.
It is essential that we use whatever policy tools we have in our toolbox to address climate change if we want to achieve health equity. National Public Health Week was April 1-7, 2024, and this year’s theme was “Protecting, Connecting, and Thriving: We are All Public Health.” Each day of the week emphasized a theme, one of which was Climate Change. The webpage included several strategies to make our climate healthier including policies that invest in healthy transportation and community design, increase affordable and energy-efficient housing, and support the transition to renewal energy.
On April 22 the world will celebrate Earth Day, which was established in 1970 by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson to create a healthier environment by protecting our planet and its resources. Once again, we will have an opportunity to think critically about our planet,
Longevity Tips From 79-Year-Old Triathlete Who Got Fit in Her 40s
- Cherie Gruenfeld didn’t start her fitness journey until her 40s.
- Now she’s 79 years old and training for her 29th Ironman Triathlon.
- She shared her tips for people who want to be as fit as she is at her age.
In her 40s, Cherie Gruenfeld was active but not fit. But that changed when she watched the Boston Marathon on TV one morning in 1986.
Gruenfeld was working a demanding sales and marketing job in Boston, and didn’t think much about fitness apart from going on the occasional hike and bike ride. But by the time the marathon was over, Gruenfeld had decided she would run the 26.2 miles the next year.
She began training right away, and 6 months later that October, she completed her first marathon in three hours and 26 minutes. She’d fallen in love with running and started doing multiple marathons a year.
Then, in 1991, she picked up a magazine about that year’s Ironman Triathlon in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, which consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run.
Gruenfeld’s husband, who’d supported her fitness journey since the beginning, encouraged her enter — even though she was by no means a swimmer and didn’t even own a bike.
So, she joined a local pool, bought a bike, and took a six-month leave of absence from her demanding job to train.
In October 1992, at 48 years of age, Gruenfeld crossed the finish line at Kona.
“I had planned on it being a one-and-done thing, but my first words to my husband were ‘I love this, and I know how I can do it better next time,'” she said.
‘A very odd and ugly worldview’: the dark side of fast fashion brand Brandy Melville | Documentary
If you haven’t heard of Brandy Melville, you probably don’t have a teenage girl in your life. The clothing brand – confusingly named for two characters, an American girl named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who fall in love in Rome – is synonymous with a certain large swath of gen Z, very online and inundated since consciousness with images of very skinny celebrities like Bella Hadid. As one ex-store associate puts it in a new HBO documentary on the brand: Brandy Melville was for the kinda basic but very trend-aware girl.
Over the past decade and a half, the brand built a giant following via Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok posts of and by teenage girls channeling a certain recognizable aesthetic: tiny outfits accentuating pre-adult metabolisms, exposed midriffs so taut they seem to be begging for a tape measure, long hair flowing cheerily in motion, overwhelmingly white. Most of the brand’s pieces sold for less than $40, in “one size fits all”, that size being small. What Abercrombie & Fitch was to millennials at the mall, Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phone – organically popular, ubiquitous and reinforcing existing, retrograde ideas of what’s cool and popular. A divisive status symbol spotted on such rail-thin celebrities as Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner that many people love to hate, and also secretly want.
More recently, the brand has also become synonymous with the environmental scourge of fast fashion and shady, discriminatory business practices. Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion, which premiered at SXSW and on HBO this week, digs deeper into a 2021 exposé by Business Insider’s Kate Taylor on the company’s murky, outright creepy management – not just the “opaque minefield” of “sustainable” fashion, as the director, Eva Orner, told the Guardian, but allegations
Nunavut sets up mobile tuberculosis clinic in Naujaat as outbreak grows
Nunavut’s Health department has opened a community-wide mobile testing clinic in Naujaat, in the hopes of testing as many people as possible for tuberculosis.
It’s been almost a year since a TB outbreak was first declared in the community of 1,200 people on May 16, 2023.
Kevin Tegumiar, Naujaat’s mayor, said the hamlet has been asking for such a clinic for several months.
“Without accurate numbers, we’re not really sure where we are. This clinic will help clear things up,” Tegumiar said.
Tegumiar said three Naujaat residents have died since the outbreak began in the community. Nunavut’s Health department confirmed those numbers in a recent interview with CBC.
Since January 2023, 21 people in Naujaat have been diagnosed with active TB.
Another 118 others have been diagnosed with latent TB, according to the department, which is almost double the number reported in November last year.
Hundreds of tests
Health officials have set a goal to test 1,000 people in Naujaat for TB by the end of the clinic, on May 30.
“We hope that every one of them are coming and get screened during the time that we are here,” said Ekua Agyemang, Nunavut’s deputy chief public health officer. “When TB is identified early, the disease is very easy to treat in the community.”
The Health department said they will deploy a team of health-care workers, including a doctor, four nurses, an epidemiologist, a radiology technician and laboratory technician.
Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, will also visit Naujaat this week as part of a tour alongside Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. officials and the territory’s health minister. Tam will also visit Pond Inlet and Iqaluit.
“Though TB will be
Peter Attia’s Quest to Live Long and Prosper
Some of my earliest memories are of summers with my grandparents, in New Delhi. I spent long, scorching months drinking lassi, playing cricket, and helping my grandparents find ripe mangoes at roadside markets. Then I’d return to the U.S., my English rusty from disuse, and go months or years without seeing them. At some point, my India trips started to feel like snapshots of loss. My grandfathers died suddenly, probably of heart attacks. My Biji, my father’s mother, fell and broke her hip in her seventies, and she spent her last years moving back and forth between her bed and her couch. My Nani, my mother’s mother, developed excruciating arthritis in both knees; in order for her to leave her fifth-floor walkup, my uncle practically had to carry her down the stairs. I have always wondered whether their fading vitality—the way their worlds contracted and their possibilities vanished—was an inevitability of aging or something that could have been averted.
Many of us have come to expect that our bodies and minds will deteriorate in our final years—that we may die feeble, either dependent or alone. Paradoxically, this outcome is a kind of success. For most of history, humans didn’t live long enough to confront the ailments of old age. In 1900, a baby born in the U.S. could expect to live just forty-seven years, and one in five died before the age of ten. But twentieth-century victories against infectious diseases—in the form of sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines—dramatically extended life spans, and today the average newborn lives to around seventy-seven. Lately, though, progress has slowed. In the past six decades, medicine has added about seven years to the average life span—less by saving young lives than by extending old ones, and often in states of ill health. In many cases, we’re
$1.3B contract for new hospital that will improve health care in Mississauga and Toronto
A largest-in-Canada, $1.3-billion contract has been awarded to build a new hospital on the Etobicoke-Mississauga border that’s expected to significantly improve health care for people in both cities when it opens in five years.
Mississauga-based EllisDon will build the new Gilgan Family Queensway Health Centre in Etobicoke, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced today.
Ford said the $1.3-billion contract represents Canada’s largest health infrastructure renewal project, which is being funded largely by the province via Infrastructure Ontario.
Work began this past February and the new hospital, which is part of the Trillium Health Partners health-care network that also includes Mississauga and Credit Valley hospitals, is expected to open in late 2029, officials said.
The new hospital will serve the rapidly growing needs of fast-growing communities, now and in the future, Ford noted, saying it’s “a critical step in making care more connected and convenient in Etobicoke and neighbouring communities.”
When completed, the 600,000-sq.-ft. Gilgan Family Queensway Health Centre will include a new patient tower described as a modern nine-story facility with more than 350 beds and fully private patient rooms to ensure privacy and enhance infection prevention control.
“The expanded space will also allow THP to connect more people to specialized care, including complex continuing care and rehabilitation services,” the province’s deputy health minister, Sylvia Jones, said in a news release.
“With this new hospital expansion, our government is ensuring the needs of Peel Region and Etobicoke will be met for decades to come.”
THP president and CEO Karli Farrow described the undertaking as an “historic project” that will serve the community for many generations to come.
“Once completed, the Gilgan Family Queensway Health Centre will…allow us to increase our hospital’s capacity to provide quality health care from Milton to Toronto,” she said. “This milestone
Seizing Opportunities and Revolutionizing Care with Public-Private Partnerships and Government Initiatives
Global Digital Health Market
Dublin, April 11, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The “Global Digital Health Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report by Technology (Healthcare Analytics, mHealth), Component (Hardware, Software, Services), Application, End-use, Region, and Segment Forecasts, 2024-2030” report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com’s offering.
The global digital health market size is anticipated to reach USD 946.0 billion by 2030 and it is projected to grow at a CAGR of 21.9% from 2024 to 2030
The market growth driven by various factors. These include the proliferation of smartphones, advancements in internet connectivity, the development of IT infrastructure, increasing healthcare IT expenditures, overburdened healthcare facilities, a growing shortage of healthcare providers, rising demand for remote patient monitoring services, escalating medical costs, improved accessibility of virtual care services, and the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases.
This growth is further propelled by the ongoing trend of digitalization in healthcare. This trend finds support in expanding public-private partnerships, emerging startups in the healthcare sector, and favorable initiatives undertaken by governments to promote digital health solutions.
Digital health encompasses diverse technologies such as telehealth services, health information technology, and mobile health (mHealth) to enhance communication within healthcare systems, fostering improved interactions between doctors and patients. The relevance of digital health technology has grown significantly, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. These contemporary solutions enhance the patient-doctor relationship and extend preventive disease strategies. Furthermore, they contribute to a shift in healthcare towards value-based treatment, amplifying the accessibility of health information for both patients and healthcare providers.
Furthermore, integrating wearable devices into healthcare reshapes how individuals manage their health. Wearables like fitness trackers and smartwatches enable continuous monitoring of vital signs, physical activity, and other health metrics. This real-time data empowers individuals to take a proactive role in their well-being and allows