Tag: healthcare

The Women’s Coalition of St. Croix is livestreaming “Forgotten in Paradise,” a locally made film examining mental health services in the territory, on their YouTube channel Saturday, April 18.

If V.I. residents “shelter in place” as Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. directed and we are lucky, a peak of 117 or so COVID-19 patients may need hospitalization at one time, V.I. Health Department officials project.

The territory and its health care systems are likely to be strained in the first weeks of May, making it all the more important for Virgin Islanders to slow the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing.

Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. submitted legislation Thursday aiming to largely reorganize how mental and behavioral health, including alcohol and substance addiction, are treated in V.I. law. The bill, which he mentioned in Monday’s State of the Territory address, does not come with a lot of new money for treatment and care.

Mother and daughter duo Drs. Janice Vaughn-Knox and Rachel Knox told a small gathering of health professionals, cannabis growers and processors on St. Thomas, that cannabis works.

As in many jurisdictions of the world, the U.S. Virgin Islands sees far too many people taken before their time through suicide. Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 added a great amount of stress to many Virgin Islanders.

In the second week of the Schneider Regional Medical Center corruption trial the jury heard from two hospital administrators who worked with two of the three defendants who are now on trial. They also heard from a former chair of the hospital board.

Hemodialysis units at the territory's two hospitals have undergone extreme challenges since the days of hurricanes Irma and Maria, and while they have stabilized, they still have a long way to go before they are successfully serving the USVI.

Lawyers representing three former executives of the Schneider Regional Medical Center offered opening arguments Wednesday in Superior Court on St. Thomas. The retrial of defendants Rodney Miller, Amos Carty and Peter Najawicz has been anticipated since a deadlocked jury led to a mistrial in 2011.

Schneider Regional Medical Center's revenues are up over last year, and the St. Thomas East End Medical Center Corporation is seeing more patients, officials said during budget hearings Thursday. But those good trends are partly fed by big increases in the number of Virgin Islanders able to get Medicaid, which may sharply cut back next month.