“Hannibal Regional Hospital's women's care center receives Baby ... - Quincy Herald-Whig” plus 4 more

Hannibal Regional Hospital's women's care center receives Baby ... - Quincy Herald-Whig
Case workers warned mom, but didn't act before baby's death - Tampa Bay Online
The Case for Real Health Care Competition - Reason.com
Tow truck driver finds baby sleeping inside towed vehicle - KARE
TAYLOR: Free health screenings will be available during Saturday fair - News-Herald

Hannibal Regional Hospital's women's care center receives Baby ... - Quincy Herald-Whig

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 01:21 PM PDT

HANNIBAL, Mo. -- Hannibal Regional Hospital's Chris Coons' Women's Care Center has been designated as a Baby-Friendly birth facility -- the only such center in the state of Missouri and one of just 83 nationwide.

Hospital officials announced the international designation from Baby-Friendly USA during a press conference this afternoon.

"Hannibal Regional Hospital is honored by the Baby-Friendly designation and, more importantly, pleased to be able to bring this level of care to our region," said John Grossmeier, hospital president, in a press release.

Baby-Friendly USA is the U.S. authority for the implementation of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, a global program sponsored by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund.

Based on the Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, the award recognizes birth facilities that offer a culture of family-centered maternity care, including giving breastfeeding mothers the information, confidence and skills needed to successfully initiate and continue breastfeeding.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that less than 2 percent of hospitals that provide birthing services in the U.S. are Baby-Friendly designated.

"Hospitals have a unique opportunity to encourage and assist mothers with the initiation and continued support of breast-feeding," Grossmeier said in a press release.

The Chris Coons' Women's Center has been working toward the designation for five years, and was awarded following a rigorous on-site survey.

Hospital officials say the women's center combines a safe medical environment with a friendly evidence-based educational environment, which prepares new parents to care for their baby with confidence.

Specific initiatives that have been implemented include:

* "Rooming in" 23 hours a day for families;

* Family quiet time from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. daily;

* "Happiest Baby on the Block" education for parents to learn how to calm their crying infant with the five S's: swaddling, side/stomach position, shushing sounds, swinging, sucking;

* Updates to education materials;

* Redesign of childbirth education classes to reflect family-centered maternity care;

* Breast Feeding Support Line and weekly breastfeeding support groups held on Monday nights and Wednesday mornings; and

* Designation of a lactation room for all breastfeeding mothers.

Studies have shown that breastfeeding translates to better health for both babies and mothers and health benefits persist throughout life. Babies who are breastfed have fewer and less serious illnesses, including a reduced risk of SIDS and less childhood cancer and diabetes.

Mothers who breastfeed enjoy decreased risks of breast and ovarian cancer, anemia and osteoporosis.

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Case workers warned mom, but didn't act before baby's death - Tampa Bay Online

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 01:07 PM PDT

By SHERRI ACKERMAN | The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 27, 2009

TAMPA - For more than a year, child welfare workers threatened to remove Jasmine Bedwell from a state-supervised program that allows some teens in foster care to live independently.

But they never made good on their intentions.

Now Bedwell and her attorney blame those workers for not doing enough to protect her and her infant son, who was kidnapped from Bedwell's apartment and later killed.

They also take issue with criticism aimed at the teen mom.

"There's a whole group of adults here" who are legally responsible for her, said attorney Tom Wadley. "And then we have this uneducated, unsophisticated girl who's been in and out of foster care since she was 5 months old.

"What kind of skills could she possible possess when you look at the totality of her life?" he asked. "How can she be expected to make rational decisions?"

On May 5, Bedwell's boyfriend forced his way into her apartment, beat her and threw 3-month-old Emanuel Murray onto a concrete floor, investigators say. Then the boyfriend, 21-year-old Richard McTear, took the boy and eventually tossed him from a moving car onto the shoulder of Interstate 275.

McTear has been charged with first-degree murder and could face the death penalty if convicted.

In state records released this week to The Tampa Tribune, Bedwell's caseworkers warned her over and over they would send her back to foster care if she didn't follow the rules.

Bedwell now says they should have realized she would resist their direction and force her to do what was right. Their own refusal to follow through with their threats to return her to foster care may have played a role in her son's death, she said.

Former DCF administrator Don Dixon disagrees.

"Personally, I think it had nothing to do with it," said Dixon, now chief operating officer for The Children's Board of Hillsborough County.

He said he's heard people saying, "'Oh, if only she had been put back into foster care, her baby would still be alive.'"

His response: It's not that simple. Even if that happened, who's to say Bedwell, a habitual runaway, wouldn't continue to cavort with criminals? Or put her baby in harm's way?

In his opinion, caseworkers faced a tough situation. "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't."

DCF has admitted missteps in this case, but regional director Nick Cox of Tampa said he still believes caseworkers were doing everything they could to help Bedwell.

"Teens are very difficult," he said. "The caseworkers can find themselves in a no-win situation at times. This job is not clear cut."

Just five days before Emanuel's death, workers recommended Bedwell be placed on monthlong probation with the Independent Living program. It was the culmination of four months of turmoil that seemed to escalate after Emanuel's birth.

Bedwell would show up to meetings with her caseworkers with bruises and cuts and tell them she had been jumped by some other girls. When child protection investigators were called to her apartment, they discovered her abusive boyfriend lived with her. Bedwell denied it to caseworkers.

Once again, they told her if she kept McTear in her life, she would have to leave Independent Living. The state-subsidized program is run by Camelot Community Care Inc., based in Clearwater, and allows responsible teens an opportunity to learn skills to make it on their own.

Participants must work at least part-time and/or attend school. They are expected to pay their bills on time, keep food in the refrigerator and the home clean. Other conditions include staying away from known criminals.

Bedwell, who had been in and out of foster care since she was an infant, didn't qualify for the program, which provides all living expenses including education.

Barely 17, she was pregnant by an older man, who was incarcerated on drug charges. Her new boyfriend was a convicted felon. Bedwell also had a criminal record and was on probation.

She couldn't even pass a test that determined her ability to perform simple tasks, such as sorting laundry or reading a map. When she was asked how often a person should bathe to maintain good hygiene, she answered every Saturday.

Still, workers pushed for Bedwell to get accepted into the Independent Living program, and DCF approved the placement. It was the only way, they said, to hang on to a girl who was living on the edge of disaster.

Reporter Sherri Ackerman can be reached at (813) 259-7144.

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The Case for Real Health Care Competition - Reason.com

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 09:47 AM PDT

"Choice, competition, reducing costs—those are the things that I want to see accomplished in this health reform bill," President Obama told talk-show host Michael Smerconish last week.

Choice and competition would be good. They would indeed reduce costs. If only the president meant it. Or understood it.

In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors winning over its customers. The market—actually, the consumer—holds businesses accountable and keeps them honest. No "public option" is needed.

So the hope for reducing medical costs indeed lies in competition and choice. Today competition is squelched by government regulation and privilege.

But Obama's so-called reforms would not create real competition and choice. They would prohibit it.

Competition is not a bunch of companies offering the same products and services in the same way. That sterile notion of competition assumes we already know all that there is to know.

But consumers often don't know what they want until it's offered, and their preferences and requirements change. Businesses don't know exactly what consumers want or the most efficient way to produce it until they are in the thick of the competitive hustle and bustle.

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek taught that competition is a "discovery procedure." In other words, the "data" of supply and demand emerge only through the market process. We need open-ended competition not merely to see which rival is better, but to learn things we didn't know before and aren't likely to learn any other way.

"Competition is valuable only because, and so far as, its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which anyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at," Hayek wrote.

Well-meaning politicians have created untold misery by assuming they and their experts know enough already.

The health care bills are perfect examples. If competition is a discovery process, the congressional bills would impose the opposite of competition. They would forbid real choice.

In place of the variety of products that competition would generate, we would be forced "choose" among virtually identical insurance plans. Government would define these plans down to the last detail. Every one would have at least the same "basic" coverage, including physical exams, maternity benefits, well-baby care, alcoholism treatment, and mental-health services. Consumers could not buy a cheap, high-deductible catastrophic policy. Every insurance company would have to use an identical government-designed pricing structure. Prices would be the same for sick and healthy.

In this respect, it wouldn't matter whether or not Congress created a "public option," a government insurance plan. In either case, bureaucrats would dictate virtually every aspect of the health-insurance business.

What Obama says in favor of a public option—as of today, at least—tells us how little he understands competition. The public option's virtue, he told Smerconish, is that "there wouldn't be a profit motive involved." But as St. Lawrence University economist Steven Horwitz writes in The Freeman magazine, profit is not just a motive. Profit (along with loss) is what enables competition to perform its discovery role:

"Suppose for a moment that we try to take the profit motive out of health care by going to a system in which government pays for and/or directly provides the services. ... (P)ublic-spirited politicians and bureaucrats have replaced profit-seeking firms.

"By what method exactly will the officials know how to allocate resources? By what method will they know how much of what kind of health care people want? And more important, by what method will they know how to produce that health care without wasting resources? ... In markets with good institutions, profit-seeking producers can get answers to these questions by observing prices and their own profits and losses in order to determine which uses of resources are more or less valuable to consumers. ... (P)rofits and prices signal the efficiency (or lack thereof) of resource use and allow producers to learn from those signals."

Profit is the key to competition. Anyone who claims to favor competition but looks down at profit has no idea what he is talking about.

John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News' 20/20 and the author of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity. He has a blog at http://blogs.abcnews.com/johnstossel.

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Tow truck driver finds baby sleeping inside towed vehicle - KARE

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 01:14 PM PDT

TAMPA, Fla. -- A Florida tow truck driver made a shocking discovery Tuesday night. He peered into the back of a car that he had just towed and saw a 13-month-old boy, sleeping in the back seat alone.

J.D. Davenport hauled the Nissan out of an apartment complex in Tampa because he said it did not have a proper parking permit.

A few minutes later, he stopped the car and shined a flashlight inside.

"I just seen the foot of the baby," recalls Davenport. "That's what struck my attention. I was like, 'Oh man, there's a kid in the car.'"

Davenport saw a baby boy sleeping in a car seat. He immediately called Tampa Police. They quickly arrived and took the 13-month-old boy into custody. The baby was fine, but questions raced through Davenport's mind.

"Why was he left alone, left in a car at this time of night," wonders Davenport.

Tampa Police arrested the child's father for child neglect. He allegedly told police that he was visiting family at the apartment complex and was not aware his car had been towed.

Davenport says he saw the car parked at the apartment complex for at least 15 minutes before he towed it.

Davenport is a father of four. He says he has never seen anything like this on the job.

"It's not right. You don't leave no kid behind. Not even for two seconds to go into the grocery store or the convenience store. You do not leave your kids in the car," he says.

The baby is now in the care of his great-grandmother. Police have notified child protection officials.

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TAYLOR: Free health screenings will be available during Saturday fair - News-Herald

Posted: 27 Aug 2009 01:00 PM PDT

By Anne Sullivan

TAYLOR — The UAW International Union Region 1A Chaplaincy Council and Child Care Providers are teaming up to help make the community healthier.

The two groups are joining forces to hold the second annual Taylor Community Fair from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Region A1 union hall, 9650 S. Telegraph Road.

The event will include free health screenings for the young and old provided by Wayne County Health Services, gospel entertainment, light refreshments and games for the children.

Among the screening provided will be vision, dental, pre- and postnatal care, well baby care, blood pressure checks, health risk for smoking and mothers who smoke, and healthy living programs for youth and seniors.

Information also will be available for Head Start programs, health care programs for small businesses, mental health, blood tests for lead, unemployment education, retraining programs, the library for the blind and how to start a small business.