News Briefs
News Briefs
AHA advises against stockpiling medicine
The latest fear among health care industry experts is that providers who depend on pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies plan on stockpiling their supplies in anticipation of the new millennium.
Concern over suppliers’ and distributors’ ability to provide uninterrupted flow of medicine and medical supplies has led some providers to make larger than normal purchases.
The Chicago-based American Hospital Association (AHA) is urging providers to resist the temptation to hoard supplies, and is assuring that supply requirements will be met as long as all purchasers stay with their normal buying patterns.
"The prudent, responsible approach to year 2000 materials management is not to hoard or stockpile," says Jonathan T. Lord, MD, chief operating officer at the AHA.
In preparation for the year 2000, however, the AHA recommends that health care providers take the following steps:
• Identify pharmaceuticals and medical/surgical supplies that are mission-critical for patient care delivery, and the normal purchasing requirements for those supplies.
• Develop contingency plans with your suppliers and distributors to support your normal inventory needs for these mission-critical supplies; identify any substitute items that can be used; and plan for managing potential supply interruptions.
• Expand existing emergency agreements between hospitals to include problems that might result from year 2000 computer glitches.
Report: HIV patient care still inferior’ for some
Quality of care among HIV patients in the United States is improving but remains "inferior" for large segments of the population, says an analysis in the June 23-30 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Three interviews with more than 2,000 HIV-infected individuals between January 1996 and January 1998 suggested that "inferior patterns of care" were seen for blacks and Latinos compared with whites, the uninsured, and Medicaid-insured compared with the privately insured, women compared with men, and other risk and/or exposure groups compared with men who had sex with men. The disparity persisted even after adjustments for variations in CD4 cell count.
Outcome measures were patterns of ambulatory and emergency room visits and receipt of antiretroviral therapy and prophylaxis against Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia.
(See: JAMA 1999; 281:2,305-2,315.)
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