State/Local

One of the effects of the pandemic has been to highlight, and exacerbate, the shortage of skilled heath care professionals such as RNs, CMAs, etc. On Monday, we’ll discuss the extent and causes of the shortage, as well as what can be done about it.

Here are some relevant readings:

State of Nursing 2022 (Nurse.org)

Nurses are not OK (Grid News)

Board Report on Closure (Island Nursing Home, Deer Isle)

If you haven’t already read the Island Nursing Home report in this week’s Packet, I encourage you to do so. It provides real, local information on many challenges we have discussed in the past.

As a warm-up to this evening’s “Community Conversation” and the Town of Surry’s public hearing on the subject, we’ll be discussing marijuana, legalization in Maine, and Peninsula town’s reactions to the opportunity to decide whether to regulate certain commercial marijuana activities.

Here’s a link to a recent Denver Post article, provided by Richard Jacoby (who spends a lot of time in Colorado–resident?), that should help to get us started. Richard notes that the Denver Post has generally been sympathetic to marijuana legalization. He also adds:

Note it is only a correlation but does underestimate the impaired problem because the samples have usually been taken several hours after the fact and in many cases once a legal limit of alcohol has been detected the coroner doesn’t bother with testing for other drugs.  It points out the difficulties of addressing the effect of drug impaired driving.

See you later today!