A Sea Change in Treating Heart Attacks

A novel way to help young men growing up in communities in which concentrated poverty, violence and unemployment are well-documented barriers to health and longevity: male youth of color are trained to be the emergency response team to help stabilize street victims before doctors or nurses begin procedures.

A hospice patient's end-of-life desires are most often thwarted when well-meaning loved ones see the patient in some sort of distress. New programs ask first-responder paramedics to work with hospice programs to better honor a person’s end-of-life wishes.

The highest hospital costs come from preventable emergency room visits. A doctor in Camden developed a home visit program which gives better and cheaper care.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdoses are the leading cause of injury-related mortality. Naxolone, a drug used to revive overdose victims, is only available by prescription. However, private organizations have distributed Naxolone kits nationally, showing that the drug can save lives when it is more readily accessible.

In Nepal, a controversial drug is proving to be effective in saving mother's lives. It's the only shelf-stable, easy-to-administer solution to curbing postpartum hemorrhage. In trials, misoprostol is shown to save the lives of women who live far from medical care facilities. Since Nepal allowed use of the drug, postpartum hemorrhage has fallen from the leading cause of maternal death to number two.

Residents who use a disproportionate amount of health care, or super utilizers, are a high cost for the system. A hospital in Baltimore is following the example of other hospitals and focusing on the underlying problems of super utilizers to reduce emergencies and save costs.

In light of a study published in BMC Medicine, authors Nancy Fullman and Alexandra Wollum take a deeper dive into Nigeria’s gains against polio and what they could mean for the country’s routine vaccine systems.

Social programs are seen as a fiscal burden on the U.S. However, investment in effective social programs saves taxpayer dollars so evaluating the performance of federal programs could help Congress act more responsibly.

Many different people are inventing health devices for resource-poor settings, but some organizations - like M.I.T.’s Little Devices group - are empowering developing communities and increasing access to healthcare by building medical devices that nurses and doctors in very poor settings can adapt themselves — or kits for making their own, often harvesting parts from toys to cleverly rig up medical equipment. It’s part of a major idea shift, one that’s transforming the design of foreign aid.

Two columns on how Iran is treating its massive epidemic of injecting drug use by tackling it as a health problem, effectively lowering H.I.V. rates among drug users using an approach to drugs known as harm reduction.