Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Time's Up Sets Its Sights On The Health Care Industry: 'One Of The First Steps Is Acknowledging The Problem'
A healthcare offshoot of Time's Up will officially launch on March 1 to try to bring safety and equity to the workplace. Time's Up was spawned out of the #MeToo movement, which gained global attention in 2017 as scores of women shared their stories of sexual harassment on social media. Time's Up has since spread to multiple industries as it looks to spur change. (Kacik, 2/28)
STAT spoke with Dr. Jane van Dis, an OB-GYN in California, the chief executive of the nonprofit Equity Quotient, and founding member of Time鈥檚 Up Healthcare, about the group鈥檚 goals. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. (Thielking, 2/28)
The National Institutes of Health on Thursday apologized for its past failures to recognize and address the culture of sexual harassment that has impacted scientists for generations. 鈥淭o all those who have endured these experiences, we are sorry that it has taken so long to acknowledge and address the climate and culture that has caused such harm,鈥 NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement. ((Facher and Thielking, 2/28)
And in other news on medical personnel and bias 鈥
Gabriel Felix is on track to graduate from Howard University's medical school in May. The 27-year-old from Rockland County, N.Y., has聽beaten the odds to make it this far, and knows he faces challenges going forward. He and other black medical school students have grown used to dealing聽with doctors' doubts about their abilities, and other聽slights: being聽confused with hospital support staff, or being聽advised聽to pick a nickname聽because their聽actual聽names would be too difficult to pronounce.聽(O'Donnell and Robinson, 2/28)
In some families, a deeply ingrained sense of betrayal, passed down through generations, can permeate doctor visits. It鈥檚 a product of medical experiments widely performed on slaves in the mid-1800s, a product of the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis experiment, begun in 1932, that denied hundreds of black men a proper diagnosis or treatment for a debilitating disease, a product of quality medical care existing just out of geographic reach. (Stevens, 3/1)
