back for more

OK, vacation's over, and I'm back to blogging. This post is kind of a grad student/public health combo. The grad student aspect of the blog is this: one more semester to go. I have one more semester until I am supposedly qualified to diagnose and treat a wide variety of ailments. Yike. The summer semester of my program, which ended just before my last post, was frighteningly bereft of clinical information. I had a class on violence and ways it may come up in clinical practice, which did make some excellent points. I had another class on the logistics of being an NP. It was devoted to admin things like licensing, practice agreements, insurance, etc. Important stuff, but it didn't really feel like it should take priority over, say, more diagnosis and management. Finally, we had a seminar where we presented cases, and that was useful. But we only met for two hours every other week, so...Anyway, suffice it to say I've gone online and bought some review books to supplement my already expensive education.

Now to public health. The President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, Drew Altman, recently wrote one of his "Pulling It Together" columns about the state of HIV prevention funding in the US. He notes that NYS is the top funder of HIV prevention, spending $88 of the $600 million spent nationally. This is slightly less impressive than it sounds, since NY is home to 17.6% of the people in the US living with HIV, and $88 million is only 14.6% of the overall funding. Still, a good start. However, the column notes these figures are for FY07, and things are likely to have changed since then thanks to the economy's shenanigans. The column also links to one of previous columns about attitudes towards HIV nationally.