$1.3B contract for new hospital that will improve health care in Mississauga and Toronto

Health Care

April 16, 2024admin

$1.3B contract for new hospital that will improve health care in Mississauga and Toronto

New Gilgan hospital in Etobicoke and Mississauga.

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

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Health Care

April 15, 2024admin

UofA medical student champions advocacy committee to talk health care

When the province’s budget 2024 was announced, Sana Samadi said through the Alberta Medical Association’s “Urgency is Real” campaign she saw how many physicians were talking about the lack of adequate funding for health care across the province.

Seeing how physicians were bringing further awareness to the current failings of primary care was part of what influenced Samadi, a first-year medical student at the University of Alberta, to focus on the work being done at a new student committee she championed in partnership with the AMA.

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Samadi, who is the president of the AMA medical student advocacy committee, launched the group in January 2024. She said the purpose of the committee is to help medical students across the province become more involved in what is happening on the ground in the health care field.

“I viewed this from a medical school perspective — students’ perspective. Even though (my peers) are interested in family medicine and they see the crisis of family medicine, they may not want to choose family medicine because of the current state,” Samadi said.

“Why would you want to join a system that you can see is having a lot of trouble right now? We need to improve this state for the years to come so that when we do enter the workforce in three to four years in our residency years, people want to choose family medicine and not only choose family medicine but choose family medicine in Alberta as opposed to other more competitive provinces like B.C.”

Samadi said while many of her fellow students are aware of the struggles in the field, there remains a gap in how they could provide their input as current students and help advocate for the health care field. On a day-to-day basis, students are

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Health Care

April 14, 2024admin

Ontario NDP wants audit into clinics charging for primary health care

Ontario’s New Democratic Party is calling on the province’s auditor general to investigate the growing number of clinics that are charging fees for primary health care.

In recent months, there has been a proliferation of private clinics offering primary care by nurse practitioners for a fee. That is leaving some of the 2.3 million Ontario residents who don’t have family doctors facing financial barriers to primary healthcare, party leader Marit Stiles said.

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“We are calling for a special audit. Anyone charging patients for health care should be held accountable, full stop,” Stiles said.

The province’s auditor general, Shelley Spence, would be required to do such an audit this year if requested by the public accounts committee. The NDP health critic, France Gélinas, put such a motion before the committee on Monday, but the motion was voted down.

Such special audits have been done in the past. Last August, the auditor general released a special report on changes to the Toronto-area Greenbelt, which had been requested by all three opposition party leaders.

Stiles said the issues were both important and timely.

“I think Ontarians deserve to know exactly how widespread this issue is,” Stiles told a news conference. “Our system is built on the principle that you should not have to pay for health care.”

A number of fee-based nurse practitioner clinics have opened in Ottawa and eastern Ontario in recent months as growing numbers of area residents have lost their family physicians.

The South Keys Health Centre on Bank Street began charging patients $400 last year to access nurse practitioners. Other clinics with similar, and higher, access fees have also opened in the region. And, earlier this year, a patient at an Appletree clinic in Ottawa, who needed a routine cancer screening test after receiving a

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Health Information

April 14, 2024admin

How to spot health misinformation online

In a tech-driven world with news just at our fingertips, it can be hard to determine what’s true and what’s false.

Of all of the misinformation floating online, fake health news can be particularly dangerous, especially if it promotes things like products that actually shouldn’t be consumed.

45% of adults surveyed by KFF in 2023 reported that they’ve heard, and believe, at least one of five false claims about Covid-19 and vaccines that KFF asked them about, prior to being surveyed. One of the incorrect claims was that ivermectin can effectively treat Covid-19, and 34% of those polled believed that it was probably true or definitely true.

“It just is a matter of taking time,” says Dr. Seema Yasmin, director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative at Stanford University. Yasmin is also the author of “What The Fact?!: Finding the Truth in All the Noise.”

“And so often when we see people fall for false information, they just haven’t taken even a second to do some of these basic checks.”

Here are a few indicators that a post online is spreading health misinformation, according to Yasmin and Deen Freelon, professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

4 signs of health misinformation online

1. It sounds too good to be true

“If something sounds too good to be true, then do a little bit more investigating,” Yasmin says.

Question the credibility of new health information that uses “words like cure, 100% effective [and] guaranteed. You’d be surprised at how quickly the human brain can want to fall for those false promises,” she adds.

“You want to do extra digging when those kinds of big promises are attached to a product or something that somebody is selling.”

2. It’s selling an alternative cure

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Health Information

April 13, 2024admin

York Region Public Health offers wide range of services

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Department Health

April 13, 2024admin

US Department of Labor finds electric vehicle battery maker again exposes workers to serious health hazards after investigation of Commerce fire

OSHA cites SK Battery America for 5 serious violations; faces more than $77K in fines

ATLANTA – For the second time in less than a year, federal workplace safety inspectors have found a global electric vehicle battery manufacturer exposing employees to serious safety and health hazards at its Commerce plant, after workers suffered potentially permanent respiratory damage in an October 2023 lithium battery fire.

After investigators with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration learned of the fire at SK Battery America Inc., they determined the company failed to train its employees on how to protect themselves adequately in the toxic atmosphere that left multiple workers injured. The agency cited SK Battery for five serious violations after finding the company did the following:

OSHA has assessed the company $77,200 in proposed penalties, an amount set by federal statute.

In December 2023, OSHA cited SK Battery for exposing employees working with cobalt, nickel, and total dust to levels above the Permissible Exposure Limit and failing to institute feasible administrative or engineering controls, among other hazards. The December 2023 inspection also found the employer exposed workers to high levels of occupational noise and failed to implement a monitoring program and audiometric testing.

Another inspection resulted in a citation that was issued in January 2024 for a hazard associated with the company’s energy control program. The company is contesting these findings before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

“On multiple occasions in less than a year, we have found SK Battery America failing in their responsibility to meet required federal standards designed to help every worker end their shift safely,” said OSHA Area Office Director Joshua Turner in Atlanta-East. “While emerging industries bring innovation and employment opportunities to our communities, they must also ensure that

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Department Health

April 12, 2024admin

US Health Dept warns hospitals of hackers targeting IT help desks

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warns that hackers are now using social engineering tactics to target IT help desks across the Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) sector.

The sector alert issued by the Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) this week says these tactics have allowed attackers to gain access to targeted organizations’ systems by enrolling their own multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices.

In these attacks, the threat actors use a local area code to call organizations pretending to be employees in the financial department and provide stolen ID verification details, including corporate ID and social security numbers.

Using this sensitive information and claiming their smartphone is broken, they convince the IT helpdesk to enroll a new device in MFA under the attacker’s control.

This gives them access to corporate resources and allows them to redirect bank transactions in business email compromise attacks.

“The threat actor specifically targeted login information related to payer websites, where they then submitted a form to make ACH changes for payer accounts,” HC3 says [PDF].

“Once access has been gained to employee email accounts, they sent instructions to payment processors to divert legitimate payments to attacker-controlled U.S. bank accounts.”

“The funds were then transferred to overseas accounts. During the malicious campaign, the threat actor also registered a domain with a single letter variation of the target organization and created an account impersonating the target organization’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO).”

In such incidents, attackers may also use AI voice cloning tools to deceive targets, making it harder to verify identities remotely. This is now a very popular tactic, with 25% of people having experienced an AI voice impersonation scam or knowing someone who has, according to a recent global study.

Scattered Spider vibes

The tactics described in the Health Department

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Health Advice

April 11, 2024admin

At UNT Health Science Center in Fort Worth, nurses can learn what it’s like to work in prisons

The University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth will soon offer nursing courses designed to get people thinking about a health care career in correctional facilities.

HSC’s brand-new College of Nursing, which is set to accept its first students this fall, will offer an elective track in correctional health, to prepare nurses for working in jails and prisons. The classes will be part of HSC’s Master of Science in Nursing Practice Innovation program.

Jan Jowitt, a professor at HSC with years of experience nursing in correctional facilities, is designing the course. There’s a lack of awareness that working behind bars is even an option, she said, and she wants to get more nurses to consider that path.

“I believe that every individual, regardless of their circumstance, deserves access to quality health care and compassionate health care,” Jowitt said.

Students will learn about the unconventional parts of nursing in a jail or prison, like navigating security protocols, or figuring out creative health advice, she said.

In prison, patients don’t always have control over what they eat or how they exercise, so some common medical advice doesn’t apply, Jowitt said. She remembered telling people how to stay moving when in solitary confinement, to prevent blood clots.

“Doing jumping jacks and jogging in place and using the mattress as leverage, like a weight, and things like that,” she said.

A photo with two blurred-out figures in the foreground. They're standing in line to get a medical screening in a jail with white-painted cinderblock walls. There's a sign that says MEDICAL above their heads. — People wait for a medical screening in the intake area Thursday, March 7, 2024, at the Tarrant County jail in Fort Worth.

Jowitt said she’s particularly concerned about what researchers have called the “aging crisis” in prisons. In 2021, 15% of people in prison were 55 or older, compared to just 3% in 1991, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

That leads to concerns about dementia, osteoporosis, and falls,

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Health Advice

April 10, 2024admin

Study reveals the impact of prompt design on ChatGPT’s health advice accuracy

In a groundbreaking study, researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and The University of Queensland have unveiled the critical impact of prompt variations on the accuracy of health information provided by Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), a state-of-the-art generative large language model (LLM). This research marks a significant advancement in our understanding of how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies process health-related queries, emphasizing the importance of prompt design in ensuring the reliability of the information disseminated to the public.

Study: Dr ChatGPT tell me what I want to hear: How different prompts impact health answer correctness

As AI becomes increasingly integral to our daily lives, its ability to provide accurate and reliable information, particularly in sensitive areas such as health, is under intense scrutiny. The study conducted by CSIRO and The University of Queensland researchers brings to light the nuanced ways in which the formulation of prompts influences ChatGPT’s responses. In the realm of health information seeking, where the accuracy of the information can have profound implications, the findings of this study are especially pertinent.

Using the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Misinformation dataset, the study precisely evaluated ChatGPT’s performance across different prompting conditions. This analysis revealed that ChatGPT could deliver highly accurate health advice, with an effectiveness rate of 80% when provided with questions alone. However, this effectiveness is significantly compromised by biases introduced through the phrasing of questions and the inclusion of additional information in the prompts.

The study delineated two primary experimental conditions: “Question-only,” where ChatGPT was asked to provide an answer based solely on the question, and “Evidence-biased,” where the model was provided with additional information from a web search result. This dual approach allowed the researchers to simulate real-world scenarios where users either pose straightforward questions to the model or seek to inform

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Health Information

April 10, 2024admin

Good evidence confuses ChatGPT when used for health information, study finds

A world-first study has found that when asked a health-related question, the more evidence that is given to ChatGPT, the less reliable it becomes—reducing the accuracy of its responses to as low as 28%.

The study was recently presented at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), a Natural Language Processing conference in the field. The findings are published in Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT explode in popularity, they pose a potential risk to the growing number of people using online tools for key health information.

Scientists from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, and The University of Queensland (UQ) explored a hypothetical scenario of an average person (non-professional health consumer) asking ChatGPT if “X” treatment has a positive effect on condition “Y.”

The 100 questions presented ranged from “Can zinc help treat the common cold?” to “Will drinking vinegar dissolve a stuck fish bone?”

ChatGPT’s response was compared to the known correct response, or “ground truth,” based on existing medical knowledge.

CSIRO Principal Research Scientist and Associate Professor at UQ Dr. Bevan Koopman said that even though the risks of searching for health information online are well documented, people continue to seek health information online, and increasingly via tools such as ChatGPT.

“The widespread popularity of using LLMs online for answers on people’s health is why we need continued research to inform the public about risks and to help them optimize the accuracy of their answers,” Dr. Koopman said. “While LLMs have the potential to greatly improve the way people access information, we need more research to understand where they are effective and where they are not.”

The study looked at two question formats. The first was a question only.

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Tag: health

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1. It sounds too good to be true

2. It’s selling an alternative cure

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