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In a dream world, every kitchen has an unlimited ice cream machine, your wardrobe updates itself instantly for every season and you get paid to take a vacation. While we can’t guarantee those first two perks any time soon, we may have a life hack for the last part. Get ready: The U.S. Virgin Islands are giving every visitors who steps ashore next year $300 to spend on their vacation. Yeah, you read that right.

The program is a part of the islands’ centennial. To celebrate 100 years of being a U.S. territory, visitors can get 300 bucks to spend exploring the island. But the bonus isn’t just a take-the-cash-and-run situation. It’s meant to help visitors get a sense of the islands’ culture, so it’s only redeemable on things like eco-tours, museum admissions, food tours or outdoorsy exploration (kayaking, hiking, climbing, etc.).

To get your $300, book a three-night stay in either St. Croix, St. John or St. Thomas through the islands’ department of tourism here. Then they’ll send you vouchers you can use like cash at participating locations. Plus, if you happen to travel during the month of March — the actual centennial month — you’ll receive a free commemorative surprise gift. Score!

Over the past year, Geisinger Health System has refunded dissatisfied patients’ out-of-pocket costs—which has helped system leaders hone in on one particular area of irritation: wait times, writes President and CEO David Feinberg in a post on LinkedIn.

The program has helped improve the system’s patient satisfaction scores, according to Feinberg. Further, it has allowed hospital leaders to see exactly what frustrates patients—and wait times consistently tops the list, he said.

To fix it, Feinberg would “like to eliminate the waiting room and everything it represents.”

To Feinberg, the waiting room tells patients that the doctor’s time is more important than their own. But organizations increasingly are moving away from that provider-centric model, he writes, and focusing more on the patient.

“When your child is suicidal or your wife has breast cancer or your parent fell down in the bathroom and they’re bleeding, the last thing you want to do is sit and wait,” he writes. “We need to increase access and availability so we can show people we see it is a privilege to take care of them—to tell patients, ‘We are waiting for you.'”

Geisinger wants to eliminate wait times in the ED altogether so that patients can receive care the moment they walk in. Feinberg “really think[s] we can accomplish this in two years,” he says.

Under the wait-free model, “treatment will start the moment patients enter the [ED] because remember, it’s an emergency,” Feinberg writes. This could manifest in many ways, including online registrations, hiring more physicians, or turning current ED waiting rooms into clinical spaces where patients can be treated.

“Treating people like a number is fine at the DMV because you don’t have to go there all the time. It’s not right in the health care system,” Feinberg concludes. “Let’s eliminate waiting rooms once and for all” (Feinberg, LinkedIn, 12/13).

Hospitals have long been reluctant to share with patients their assessments of which nursing homes are best because of a Medicare requirement that patients’ choices can’t be restricted.

For years, many hospitals simply have given patients a list of all the skilled nursing facilities near where they live and told them which ones have room for a new patient. Patients have rarely been told which homes have poor quality ratings from Medicare or a history of public health violations, according to researchers and patient advocates.

“Hospitals are not sure enough that it would be seen as appropriate and so they don’t want to take the chance that some surveyor will come around to cite them” for violating Medicare’s rules, said Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient safety at the American Hospital Association.

As a result, patients can unknowingly end up in a nursing home where they suffer bed sores, infections, insufficient staffing or other types of substandard care.

But hospitals’ tight-lipped approach to sharing quality information may soon be changed. The Obama administration is rewriting those rules, not just for patients going to nursing homes but also those headed home or to another type of health facility.

Hospitals will still have to provide patients with all nearby options, but the new rule says hospitals “must assist the patients, their families, or the patient’s representative in selecting a post-acute care provider by using and sharing data” about quality that is relevant to a particular patient’s needs for recovery. The rule was drafted in October 2015.

The administration hasn’t said when it will be finalized. Should it not be enacted before the end of President Obama’s term, its fate becomes uncertain. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged not to approve new regulations unless two existing ones are eliminated.

We have reached the point that indisputably mentally ill people are being allowed to commit suicide or to die from their terrible psychiatric afflictions.

In Belgium, a chronic self-harmer was voluntarily euthanized and organ harvested.

In California, a regulation permits the involuntarily institutionalized mentally ill dying to be released for the purpose committing assisted suicide.

And now, a court has ordered that a woman with anorexia not be kept alive through forced feeding even though it means she will starve herself to death. From the Daily Record story:

Armstrong found that the woman identified as A.G. had expressed an unwavering wish to refuse force-feeding after a near-lifelong battle with anorexia nervosa.

Armstrong said that the people around her — her parents, treating psychiatrist and physicians, the bioethics committee of Morristown Medical Center, her guardian and lawyer – all concur that it’s in A.G.’s best interests to be transferred to a palliative care unit at the hospital where she won’t be force-fed as the state Department of Human Services – which operates Greystone – wanted.

I understand autonomy. But by definition, this poor woman is not competent to make decisions about herself and her own wellbeing with regard to food.

A.G. is lethally mentally ill! Everyone who should be her most ardent protectors–for the best of motives, to be sure–instead surrendered to her disease.

Up to 31 per cent of elderly patients receive the wrong medication after being transferred into a care centre and three-quarters of nursing home residents receive at least one inappropriate drug, yet the proportion of mistakes causing the death of such frail people is unusually low.

A review led by Joseph Ibrahim of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Monash Uni­versity examined various studies to determine the global prevalence of medication errors resulting in hospitalisation and death of nursing home residents. In the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, published yesterday, researchers reported on a high rate of medication errors among older people causing preventable harm and significant financial burden.

However, Professor Ibrahim said the finding that medication errors were fatal in 9 per cent to 15 per cent of occasions involving people aged between 70 and 90 raised the possibility of under-­reporting, and of deaths wrongly assumed to be due to underlying illnesses.

“We were expecting much larger numbers because older people have as many as three to five other diseases, tend to be over 80 and don’t have much reserve,” he said. “I think society in general undervalues older people, particularly older people who are in nursing homes, assumed to be waiting to die, for whom (it is ­assumed) an early death is a good thing.”

Professor Ibrahim said wrong medications, or those given to the wrong person were more often detected than wrong doses or an inappropriate mix of drugs.

He applauded efforts to better manage medication use in older people and the “de-prescribe” move­ment addressing harmful and unnecessary drug use, but said more research was needed to better target such initiatives.

In YouTube videos, Timothy Nwokorie calls himself a bishop and preaches about the word of God. But police are alleging the native of Nigeria tried to sexually assault a nursing home patient at this South Dallas nursing home.

Until Thursday, he’d worked at Modern Senior Living as a nurse. His wife says he’s innocent.

“He’s a man of God,” said Ngozi Nwokorie, his wife. “Timothy is loved by everyone that comes around him. I’m not just saying it because he’s my husband. He is a man people want to have contact with.”

According to court documents, a resident told police that she was sleep and awoke about 2:30 a.m. Thursday to find Nwokorie fondling her breasts. She told police that she pushed his hand away repeatedly, but that he kept groping her. She says he told her, “Look at this,” and that he unzipped his pants and was holding his private parts.

She told police that he reached under her blankets and tried to shove his hand between her legs. The resident told police that as she continued to resist, he climbed on top of her and tried to pull the blankets off while she clutched them.

“A noise in the hall distracted the arrestee who then climbed off the complainant [and] told her, ‘I’ll be back later,’ and then left the room,” the warrant says.

Walter Reed, the administrator, confirmed to News 8 that Nwokorie had been fired.

“Right now, we can’t say anything about it,” he said. “I’m always shocked when something like that happens.”

According to the court documents, Reed also told police that Nwokorie wasn’t scheduled to be working in that area of the nursing home. He told police that video shows Nwokorie entering the room and staying for seven minutes.

State records show Nworkie has been licensed as a nurse in Texas since 2005. His wife says she’s worked at the nursing home for two years, and has worked at other nursing home facilities in the area.

Ngozi Nwokorie, his wife, says he is very upset by the allegations. She indicated that she thought it could be a misunderstanding.

“People accuse,” she said. “Maybe sometime you will try to get a resident up before you know it they will tell you, ‘don’t touch me.’”

His wife says he graduated from seminary and that they hold church in their home.

Nwokorie has been released on $25,000 bond. He faces one count of attempted sexual assault, a third degree felony.

Source: WFAA