broken HEALTHCARE: Recent Episodes
Joy Rios
A podcast with industry insiders to examine, diagnose, and propose a treatment plan for what ails American healthcare. Listen and then share your #brokenHEALTHCARE story.
On this, the first of a multi-part, episode of Broken Healthcare, we take a deep dive into the reasons we’re seeing doctors begin to mobilize around getting more involved in politics. As we pull on the thread of what makes our healthcare system broken, especially in the time of COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s becoming more clear that the inequities that show up within the system are a result of the infrastructure that it is built upon. To put it succinctly, we’re revealing how racism can literally make us sick.
Doctors have a unique perspective. They regularly get an up-close view of how their patient’s race profoundly impacts their health. In this episode, we hear directly from Dr. Cameron Webb, who is a practicing physician who is also running for a seat in Congress, representing the Commonwealth of Virginia’s fifth district. He, among others, has his sights on changing the system from the top, the place from which the dominos that affect all of us fall.
On the second half of this two-part episode on Broken Healthcare, we follow along as the Akrie family struggles to find answers after they learn their father, a resident of a long-term care facility, has fallen ill with Covid-19. How did this happen? Could it have been prevented? As the coronavirus pandemic claims victim after victim in American nursing homes, thousands of grief-stricken families are beginning to feel that the loved ones they’ve lost are victims of a fundamentally flawed corner of our broken healthcare system.
You have probably heard the headlines: The coronavirus is hitting our
nursing homes and long-term care facilities hard. By late April, more than
11,000 people have died from the disease in US nursing homes. But those
people are more than numbers. They’re our loved ones and friends. On the
first half of this two-part episode of Broken Healthcare, we follow along
as Scott Akrie struggles to find out how his father’s is feeling as he is
in a facility that has the potential for grave danger with the pandemic
running wild.
In this episode of Broken Healthcare, we meet a nurse who must balance protecting her job, her patients, and her personal health amid the PPE shortage. We also find out what it’s like to be a patient who needs a potentially life-saving surgery at a time when elective operations have ground to a halt. Is the healthcare system supporting its workers and giving equal treatment to all patients? We’ll answer these questions and more in the fourth installment of Broken Healthcare.
As the coronavirus spreads across the world, so does uncertainty. On this episode of Broken Healthcare, we tell the story of a young woman in Seattle who exhibited symptoms but couldn't get access to a test. She was forced to choose forgoing a paycheck or exposing at-risk patients to the virus. To make some sense of the coronavirus testing conundrum, we speak with Amber Gabrielle, an epidemiologist in Maryland. But answers remain elusive.