Medical personnel, police, and school officials appear to be learning about more incidents of violence against children and teens than they used to, but there is still substantial room for improvement in reporting, researchers said.

Among some 2,650 youths in a telephone survey who reported exposure to violence in the previous year, 45.7% said the authorities knew about at least one of the violent incidents, according to David Finkelhor, PhD, of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and colleagues.

A similar survey conducted in 1992 indicated that only about 25% of violent incidents were reported to schools or police.

A Carroll County paramedic has been given a suspended 10-day jail sentence for the way he drove an ambulance that ran into a semitrailer, killing another paramedic and a patient.

Boone County prosecutor Daniel Gonnerman says Genzen should have slowed down much sooner as he attempted to pass the semi on the right on U.S. Highway 30 near Beaver in Boone County.

Senate leaders have reached a tentative, one-year deal on the Medicare “doc-fix,” sources close to the negotiations say.

The deal pays for the must-pass extension of Medicare doctors’ payments with changes in the tax subsidy program that some consumers will use after 2014 to buy health insurance on the new exchanges.

Method A literature search was conducted using medical electronic databases, MEDLINE CINHAL, EMBASE, Meditext, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), and Scopus. These databases were searched from January 1996 until the end of January 2010. Articles were included if the principal objective was to compare ventilation efficiency of the LMA against the BVM in the prehospital setting. References from articles retrieved were reviewed.

Results There were 2937 articles located by the search. Of these, 30 articles met the inclusion criteria with twelve relevant to the prehospital environment. In the twelve prehospital studies, two involved the use of mannequins, four were retrospective, five were observational, and there was one a literature review.

Conclusion The findings from this review suggest that the LMA is more effective at ventilations over time during CPR in adults, as there is less risk of gastric regurgitation and pulmonary aspiration. The BVM is quicker at performing the first ventilation but there is a loss of effectiveness over time. BVM is considered the best method for ventilating children and neonates.

Del Mar High School’s principal is under fire after blocking an ambulance from driving onto the school’s track to reach a 14-year-old running back who suffered a concussion during a football game.

Emergency workers had to haul a gurney 75 yards down field to where Keanu Gallardo lay after suffering a blow to his neck and helmet near the end of Del Mar’s frosh-soph game on Oct. 29.

Sometimes it’s good to be a health-care CEO. Health-care company chief executives had the highest median pay of any industry captured by the recent The Wall Street Journal CEO Compensation Study.

The median CEO pay in the industry was $10 million, according to the study, which was done in conjunction with consulting firm Hay Group. That beat out consumer goods at $8.9 million and telecom and oil and gas, both with median CEO pay of $8.6 million. The study looked at total direct compensation, which includes salary, bonuses and the value of long-term incentives, including stock and stock options at the time of the grant.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid has posted guidance offering clarity on how hospitals should include emergency department patients in their measures associated with stage one of meaningful use of electronic health records, according to an update by CMS.

The new guidelines clarify which emergency department patients should be included in the denominators of measures for the EHR incentive program. The denominator will include patients admitted to the inpatient setting through the emergency department and patients who are treated in the emergency department’s observation unit or who otherwise receive observation services.

Emergency Room Physician

Paul

Sen. Chuck Grassley took another swipe at lucrative tax breaks of nonprofit hospitals yesterday–-at a hearing that wasn’t even about hospitals.

In prepared remarks, Sen. Grassley said, “the troubling thing about her story is that these were the actions taken by a hospital that’s funded through taxpayers’ dollars and charitable gifts.” A staffer told the Health Blog in an email that Grassley was “particularly shocked at the upfront-billing tactics” described in the WSJ article.

Hinting once again that the nonprofit tax breaks could be in jeopardy unless hospitals change their billing practices, Grassley said: “As we talk about the tax incentives for health insurance, I want us to also consider the billions of dollars of tax benefits conferred to nonprofit hospitals.”