Former Kettering Health board member calls for better oversight and more transparency as health network faces allegations

Former Kettering Health board member calls for better oversight and more transparency as health network faces allegations

Former Kettering Health board member Phil Parker called for the health network to be more transparent with the public and for the board of directors to improve oversight in the wake of allegations of extravagant spending and abuse of charitable funds by hospital system officials.

“There’s going to have to be trust rebuilt in the system,” said Parker, who left the Kettering Health board of directors in the summer of 2022 at the end of his second term after six years on the board. He remains on the boards overseeing the network’s Soin Medical Center and Kettering Health Greene Memorial and retired in 2020 after 26 years as president and CEO of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce.

“Once we determine the issues and any of the recommendations to improve our governing structure it would be my hope that we would share that with not only the board and the employees, but also our community.”

Parker spoke exclusively to the Dayton Daily News about the allegations and the health network’s internal investigation.

Crisis management experts agreed with Parker that Kettering Health must communicate clearly with the public, patients, employees, donors and other stakeholders to rebuild trust.

“The thing you have to provide first and foremost is transparency,” said Lanier Holt, associate professor in the school of communication at Ohio State University. “If you’re transparent and open, people will be more inclined to believe you than to distrust you. Once they distrust you it’s almost impossible to get that trust back. They need to get out in front of this and tell the story.”

Kettering Health has refused to comment beyond a March 27 written statement that was the first public indication from the health system, operated by the non-profit Kettering Adventist Healthcare, that allegations had been made and an internal investigation was launched.

Kettering Health operates 15 medical centers and more than 120 outpatient locations throughout southwestern Ohio, as well as Kettering Health Medical Group, which includes more than 700 board-certified providers.

A complaint filed with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost in February alleged improper spending by former CEO Fred Manchur, former Kettering Health Board Chair Dave Weigley and others. The allegations, made anonymously, involve spending on travel, automobiles and renovations to Manchur’s Kettering home.

Yost also received a complaint in August from former Kettering Health employee Lori Van Nostrand regarding Manchur’s expense reports, entertainment costs and decisions on buying property, among other issues.

Allegations of financial and administrative impropriety and nepotism were included in a 2021 anonymous letter signed “Concerned SDA Church Members and Friends of Kettering Health” and addressed to health network associates, Seventh-day Adventist Church officials and government officials.

Confidentiality rules prohibit the attorney general, who oversees charitable organizations, from confirming or denying the existence of an investigation, said Kelly May, spokeswoman for Yost.

Manchur retired Dec. 31, two months after Kettering Health announced he was taking a leave of absence before retiring. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Weigley stepped down as long-time board

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Ukraine, contending with Covid and polio, faces mounting overall health threats

Ukraine, contending with Covid and polio, faces mounting overall health threats

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provides a host of critical threats to public wellbeing outside of the armed service violence alone, authorities warn.

The conflict could make it tricky for individuals with problems like diabetic issues or cancer to get remedy, and it may perhaps boost the distribute of infectious conditions, which includes Covid-19, as people collect in shelters or flee the country. 

Ukraine is coming off its most significant spike in Covid instances nonetheless — its seven-day common hit a file of 37,408 on Feb. 10, according to an NBC Information tally. Fewer than 40 percent of the population had been vaccinated as of Feb. 15.

What is much more, Ukraine has been striving to manage a polio outbreak since Oct. Two small children with paralytic polio have been discovered, and 19 much more were identified as infected with the virus but did not develop paralysis. 

“Affirmation of the 2nd paralytic circumstance in January 2022 is evidence that the virus is nonetheless circulating in the country,” Entire world Wellbeing Business spokesperson Tarik Jašarević stated in a statement. “The existing crisis in Ukraine boosts the possibility of national and international spread of the virus.”

As of 2020, about 87 per cent of the population had gained the to start with dose of the polio vaccine, Jašarević reported. Ukraine started a vaccination marketing campaign on Feb. 1 targeting little ones younger than 6 who hadn’t gotten their polio photographs.

“It is essential that the campaign proceeds to guarantee that the remaining around 100,000 young children are safeguarded,” he reported. 

Dr. Timothy Erickson, a medical professional at Brigham and Women’s Medical center and faculty member at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, mentioned there is problem the polio scenario count will grow.

“With conflicts it is pretty obvious that polio instances do not only raise but re-emerge in international locations in which it was at the time believed to be eradicated,” he stated.

In the additional fast expression, however, world well being gurus worry about coming disruptions of care for people today in Ukraine who have noncommunicable ailments. 

“We’re speaking almost everything from insulin for diabetes, cardiac prescription drugs, but then also some of the more critical and highly-priced ailments — treatments for cancer, dialysis,” Paul Spiegel, director of the John Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, explained.

These types of disruptions could transpire, Spiegel defined, if people are shifting in or out of the region, or if an insufficient provide of medication is getting into Ukraine, or if hospitals get shut down.

Global health and fitness gurus be expecting most Ukrainians’ problems about Covid to acquire a backseat to a lot more pressing survival demands in these early times of violence but stated it is likely transmission of the virus will increase.

It will, however, probably be hard to evaluate a Covid raise in true time, according to Sonny Patel, a public well being practitioner and traveling to scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan College of General public Health.  

“These quantities are going to have

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Yale New Haven Health System faces nurse shortage

Yale New Haven Health System faces nurse shortage


Yale Daily News

As the Yale New Haven Health System emerges from the brunt of its battle with coronavirus, it faces another challenge — an ongoing shortage of nurses.

The health system has a “very, very large volume” of open positions, Melissa Turner, senior vice president for human resources at YNHH, told the New Haven Register. Turner attributed the challenges to the increasingly taxing job of being a nurse, as well as to a nationwide labor shortage

Nurses who served during the COVID-19 pandemic encountered numerous patients on ventilators and risked their personal safety to treat patients infected with the highly contagious virus. Now, as local case rates lower, the health system has seen a greater influx of patients as a result of elective surgeries that were rescheduled earlier in the pandemic. These patients are often in a worse condition than usual after putting off procedures for multiple months or years, Turner explained.

Two nurses spoke to the News on the condition of anonymity due to fear of loss of livelihood. They were told by hospital Human Resources not to speak to the media about the issue, according to the nurses. The News could not confirm the veracity of this statement. Media Relations Coordinator for YNHH Mark D’Antonio attempted to connect the News with hospital leadership, but ultimately did not answer multiple requests for comment. He said that no frontline nurses or other hospital staff would be available for the story.

“Working during COVID made them realize that it might not be worth it to be near all that sickness for those long hours for the amount of pay,” one nurse said. “They are just getting burnt out. It is not the hospital or Yale’s fault.”

According to Beth Beckman, chief nursing executive for YNHH, burnout is a major issue among nurses. She cited a survey by the American Organization for Nursing Leadership that showed that 75 percent of nurse leaders saw the emotional health and wellbeing of staff as a major issue.

With the increased workload wrought by the pandemic as well as fewer nurses, Beckman said that YNHH had to ask many nurses to work more hours. She said that nurses have “raised their hand” to make sure patients receive care and added that the hospital has adapted its operations as the pandemic has progressed.

“Our mantra and our real commitment is to take care of our people,” Beckman said. “Our frontline. And I think the most important thing we’re going to do in this space is to listen to their ideas. They commonly have the solutions and to institute them in a way that’s helpful to them. So we absolutely are committed to making sure the frontline helps us modify whatever it is we need in our work environment.” 

According to Beckman, the nursing shortage is nationwide. She said that hospitals are facing the same operational challenges nationally, and probably globally.

Still, Beckman added that

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Biden’s plan to add dental coverage to Medicare faces pushback : Shots

Biden’s plan to add dental coverage to Medicare faces pushback : Shots

Like many seniors, William Stork of Cedar Hill, Mo., lacks dental insurance and doesn’t want to pay $1,000 for a tooth extraction he needs. Health advocates see President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to provide dental coverage to people like Stork who are on Medicare. An unlikely adversary: the American Dental Association.

Joe Martinez for Kaiser Health News


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Joe Martinez for Kaiser Health News


Like many seniors, William Stork of Cedar Hill, Mo., lacks dental insurance and doesn’t want to pay $1,000 for a tooth extraction he needs. Health advocates see President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to provide dental coverage to people like Stork who are on Medicare. An unlikely adversary: the American Dental Association.

Joe Martinez for Kaiser Health News

William Stork needs a tooth out. That’s what the 71-year-old retired truck driver’s dentist told him during a recent checkup.

That kind of extraction requires an oral surgeon, which could cost him around $1,000 because, like most seniors, Stork does not have dental insurance, and Medicare won’t cover his dental bills. Between Social Security and his pension from the Teamsters union, Stork says, he is able to live comfortably in Cedar Hill, Mo., about 30 miles southwest of St. Louis.

But that $1,000 cost is significant enough that he has decided to wait until the tooth absolutely must come out.

Stork’s predicament is at the heart of a long-simmering rift within the dental profession that has reemerged as a battle over how to add dental coverage to Medicare, the public insurance program for people 65 and older — if a benefit can pass at all.

A once-in-a-generation opportunity

Health equity advocates see President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to provide dental coverage for those on Medicare, nearly half of whom did not visit a dentist in 2018 — well before the pandemic paused dental appointments for many people. The rates were even higher for Black (68%), Hispanic (61%) and low-income (73%) seniors.

The coverage was left out of a new framework announced by Biden on Thursday, but proponents still hope they can get the coverage in a final agreement. Complicating their push is a debate over how many of the nation’s more than 60 million Medicare beneficiaries should receive it.

Advocates of dental coverage for everyone on Medicare find themselves up against an unlikely adversary: the American Dental Association, which is backing an alternative plan that would give dental benefits only to low-income Medicare recipients.

Medicare has excluded dental (and vision and hearing) coverage since its inception in 1965. That exclusion was by design: The dental profession has long fought to keep itself separate from the traditional medical system in order to preserve the field’s autonomy.

Dental care and health are intertwined

More recently, however, dentists have stressed the link between oral and overall health. Most infamously, the 2007 death of a 12-year-old boy that might have been prevented by an $80

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