Healthcare professionals can improve patient screening for opioid abuse and better identify patients with opioid use disorder, experts said here Friday, recognizing that these efforts will be difficult. 

"It's so frustrating because we know what works," said Dr. Leana Wen. "It's so easy, I cannot understand why we don't do it more ... We are rationing Narcan."

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The Baltimore City Council appears poised to pass a bill requiring restaurants to make children’s meals healthier, drawing ire from the industry.

“Taking out empty calories from sugary drinks is a powerful lifestyle change we can make to help our children to get and stay healthy,” said Dr. Leana Wen, the city’s health commissioner, in a statement. 

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The Health Department’s Maternal and Infant Care program (M&I), operates the national Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) home visiting model to help low-income, first-time mothers have healthy pregnancies and successful birth and aftercare outcomes

As an emergency physician, I treated patients before and after the introduction of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Before the ACA, I routinely saw dozens of uninsured patients every single day. They were uninsured not because they didn’t want insurance or believed they didn’t need it, but because they couldn’t afford it. I treated Sarah, a 47-year old nurse’s aide, who was diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread throughout her body. Had she been insured, her cancer could have been detected earlier, and she might have been cured. Instead, Sarah died six months after her diagnosis, leaving her three young children without their mother.

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