Sunday, May 26, 2013
As our armed forces come home from the Middle East, the local Veterans Affairs benefits office is being stretched.
Returning veterans are now facing a new enemy at home—long wait times for their disability claims. The waiting times started increasing in 2010 when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq causing a dramatic uptick in first-time filers, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. The data found that in most regional VA offices, not only did waiting times increase, but they vary dramatically with location: about 508 days in Baltimore, Maryland and 134 days in Fargo, North Dakota. The national average now stands at about 11 months, which is dramatically higher than in 2009 when it was 116 days. Claims sent to the VA's Boston office take on average 411.6 days to process a disability claim. That's more than 13 months before the average …
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Medicare database shows how hospitals across Boston—and the nation—compare for care. Hospitals, meanwhile, criticized the data as inaccurate.
Which Boston emergency room is the most efficient? It depends on what you mean, according to data released by the Center for Medicare & Medicid Services. At the South End's Boston Medical Center, the average time patients spent in the emergency department before they were seen by a healthcare professional was 18 minutes, which is much quicker than the state and national averages of 40 and 30 minutes, but but longer than the wait at Mass. General, which is 10 minutes. Of those patients, the average time patients spent in the BMC emergency department before being sent home was 181 minutes, compared to the state average of 152 minutes and the national average of 140 minutes. Finally, the average time patients spent in the BMC emergency …
Boston's hospitals excel in different areas of emergency care. See how they stack up against each other.
Boston's famous for its medical facilities, several of which offer emergency care. But anyone who's gone to the ER in the city knows it can take a while before you get back home. The chart above compares various emergency room wait times in Boston. The data used comes from the center for Medicare & Medicaid Center's Hospital Compare web site. Learn more about the Medicare data used in this chart. SOUTH END PATCH: Facebook | Twitter | E-mail Updates
Monday, December 10, 2012
A Massachusetts gun owners group is lobbying for passage of a bill that would confer lifetime gun licenses.
Way too much red tape. That's the complaint of the Gun Owners’ Action League of Massachusetts, a group that is urging passage of a law that would abolish the requirement of having to renew a gun permit every six years, according to the Boston Herald. For comparison, Massachusetts vehicle drivers' licenses need to be renewed every five years. But the league says local police cannot keep up with timely gun permit renewals, and legitimate gunowners go license-less until the cops get time to do the paperwork. The law now allows 40 days for turning around license applications. In Boston, almost 1,000 people have applied for gun permits so far this year, with waits running about 10 weeks, the Herald quotes police spokeswoman Cheryl Fiandaca as …
Carol Bragg
1:54 pm on Monday, June 17, 2013
Tamika: You are, of course, right. And you, like others who have been through trauma on the battlefield or elsewhere, can become wounded healers. From your own wounds you can heal others. And healing others, you can heal yourself. more ›