Patient Safety and Ethics

Dozens of patients have died needlessly due to errors made in Indian Health Service hospitals in South Dakota alone.

The move to push tribes onto reservations came with health consequences. Traditional diets were harder to access, which meant people couldn’t hunt or gather traditional foods or ingredients for medicines.

As the country faces a deluge of older patients, emergency departments nationwide are seeking ways to improve senior care.

At Saint Agnes Medical Center in Fresno, all of the hospital’s employees get violence prevention and awareness training, but those who work in the emergency department get more.

Safe injection facilities represent the highest ideal of harm reduction services for people who inject drugs, yet in the United States remain almost prohibitively controversial.

A few days before Christmas in 2015, a 54-year-old immigrant named Jose Manuel Azurdia Hernandez began vomiting in his cell at a detention center in Adelanto, California.

San Diego hospitals seeking are trying to steer non-emergency patients away from emergency rooms. Why? And how is the trend affecting county ER wait times?

Judith Lewis Mernit’s reporting on harm reduction in rural California was supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2018 Impact Fund.

Joe Rubin is a Sacramento-based investigative reporter and a fellow with USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism. His reporting on workplace exposures to lead in California has appeared in Capital & Main.

This story was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2018 California Fellowship.