Amid covid health worker shortage, foreign-trained professionals sit on sidelines
As hospitals nationwide struggle with the latest covid-19 surge, it s not so much beds or ventilators in short supply. It s the people to care for the sick.
Yet a large, highly skilled workforce of foreign-educated doctors, nurses and other health practitioners is going largely untapped due to licensing and credentialing barriers. According to the Migration Policy Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., some 165,000 foreign-trained immigrants in the U.S. hold degrees in health-related fields but are unemployed or underemployed in the midst of the health crisis.
Many of these workers have invaluable experience dealing with infectious disease epidemics such as SARS, Ebola or HIV in other countries yet must sit out the covid pandemic.
In prostate cancer, as in life, you roll the dice.
In craps, 3+3 is called a hard six. It s hard because you can only win if you repeat with a combination of 3+3. Any other sixes you roll 4+2, 5+1 are losers.
Gleason 3+3 is a hard six in prostate cancer. It is the lowest grade cancer in the traditional Gleason scoring system. Still, to the eye of a pathologist, a Gleason 6 looks like a malignancy.
Now, a few experts are questioning whether this hard six is a cancer at all. Some urologists see a Gleason 6 as a noncancerous growth that has the potential to be invasive, but most likely will never spread to other organs or end up killing a man.