Public hospitals versus the VA

There are three new fellows in residence at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The itinerant intellectuals will pursue research interests this summer, according to an April 3 press release. Cathy Davidson is an English professor at the CUNY Graduate Center who has written several books, including Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America and Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. Stephen Pitti is a professor of history and American studies at Yale University and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Olga Viso is a senior advisor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and was appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Arts in 2013.

Can you write a 1,000-word essay well enough for to win a Spark Prize? Applications are open for the annual contest hosted by the Brooklyn Community Foundation, which awards five $100,000 prizes to nonprofits in the borough each year. The deadline to apply is March 10 at 5 p.m. Here are all the details on what you need to win.

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has laid down a challenge for a contract to provide food and and nutrition services for people living with AIDS/HIV. Interested parties should contact the department by April 10 if they think they are up to the task. Otherwise, The Momentum Project is likely to get its contract renewed, according to the City Record. The Queens-based Voces Latinas Corporation and the Bronx-based Urban Health Plan have won respective contracts of $104,206 and $109,375 to deliver health services on behalf of the department.

Have clients who are veterans? The New York Health Foundation has an analysis of how VA hospitals are better than community-based hospitals for certain services across New York state. Overall, the two types of facilities provide fairly equal levels of services – with two exceptions:

• “VA hospitals tend to perform better than their regional community-based hospitals for health outcomes related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and in fewer deaths within 30 days of discharge among heart failure patients.”
• “Conversely, VA hospitals tended to perform worse than community-based hospitals in 30-day readmissions for heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia patients.”