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Combo Disaster and Environmental Injustice

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Join us for the Disaster STS Network’s Fall 2021 virtual tour of Louisiana's Cancer Alley, a corridor of chemical plants along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans with shockin

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joerene.aviles

The stakeholders are Dr. Atul Gawande, other healthcare professionals, and the patients with terminal illnesses. They have to decide what the patient's priorities are, treatment options, and basically how much time and quality of life patients are willing to trade for extended years to live. Is the treatment making the patient worse or better? Doctors have to put themselves in a position of vulnerability by personally getting to know their patients, and deal with the guilt and blame if their treatments aren't successful or what they had said to the patient's family.

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joerene.aviles

1. Under private equity ownership, some ambulance response times worsened, heart monitors failed and companies slid into bankruptcy, according to a Times examination of thousands of pages of internal documents and government records, as well as interviews with dozens of former employees. In at least two cases, lawsuits contend, poor service led to patient deaths.

2. “Private equity has, in this case, threatened public safety,” said Richard Thomas, the mayor of Mount Vernon, N.Y, which relied on TransCare. “It’s not the way to treat the public.”

3.  Do the Write Thing “didn’t sit well with the firefighters,” said Nico Latini, who has worked at Rural/Metro for a decade. “We operate under a high level of integrity and we do the right thing every day — with an R, not a W.”

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joerene.aviles

Emergency response isn't explicitly addressed in the article, but in order to incorporate structural interventions into public health, emergency response would have to be improved as well. As the article states, there are many "diseases of poverty" and medical emergencies would be more common in those populations. Noting these trends can streamline medical response and help with providing education/ resources to prevent emergencies.