More than 80% of U.S. nursing homes reported staffing shortages in early 2023. SciLine interviewed Dr. Jasmine Travers, a gerontological nurse practitioner and assistant professor of nursing at New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing, and asked her how the shortage affects health care for nursing home residents, if nursing homes in poorer neighborhoods have been hit harder by the shortages, and what can be done to fix the problem.

Below are some highlights from the discussion. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Who lives in nursing homes in the United States?

Jasmine Travers: There are 15,000 nursing homes with approximately 1.2 million residents. That population can range in age, although most commonly it’s those 65 years of age or older.

What is the current state of nursing home staffing?

Jasmine Travers: In 2001, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed minimum staffing standards. They indicated that total nursing hours should be 4.1 hours per resident per day. And that’s including the registered nurse, the licensed practical nurse and the certified nursing assistants. Only 25% of nursing homes were found to be meeting those total nursing hours in 2019.

How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect nursing home occupancy and staffing?

Jasmine Travers: Occupancy levels hovered at about 80% prior to the pandemic. During the pandemic, occupancy went down to a low of 67%. By the end of 2022, those levels had gone up to 72%.

Lower occupancy levels can be a significant issue. Higher occupancy brings in more revenue to the nursing homes. With lower occupancy and less revenue coming in, then that’s a decrease in financial support that the nursing home needs to run their day-to-day activities.

How does nursing home staffing affect the quality of care and health outcomes for residents?

Jasmine Travers: A number of studies show that when staffing is low, emergency hospitalization visits increase. Some of these visits could have been addressed by care provided in the nursing home setting. We also see increased instances of pressure ulcers, urinary tract infections, falls and deficiency citations – issued when a nursing home does not meet a certification minimum standard.

When nursing homes are understaffed, that means there might not be a sufficient number of certified nursing assistants to, for example, answer call bells. That might translate to residents sitting in their beds needing help for longer periods of time.

In those instances, if a person doesn’t have someone to get them out of bed, sometimes they might try to get up themselves. And when they do that, they could be at risk of falling. Or if they stay in bed and they’re soiled, they’re at increased risk for urinary tract infections or pressure ulcers.

What can be done to alleviate nursing home staffing challenges?

Jasmine Travers: Areas that are socioeconomically deprived or that lack good transportation, housing and schools are less desirable places to work.

Just recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released an announcement that they are going to allow for those in pediatric specialties to receive loan reimbursements and loan forgiveness for working in underserved areas. A similar program for those working in nursing homes would likely increase staffing.

I’d also like to see improved wages and benefits and more investment in retention efforts to keep the people who are already working in nursing homes working there.

One of the biggest issues when it comes to staffing is turnover. People will stay when the work environment is changed. And when people stay longer, they know their residents more. That consistency translates to better quality of care.

Watch the full interview to hear more.

SciLine is a free service based at the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.

Jasmine Travers, Assistant Professor of Nursing, New York University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A video showing a close encounter between a hiker in Utah and a mountain lion defending her cubs went viral in 2020. The video, during which the hiker remained calm as the mountain lion followed him for several minutes, served as a visceral reminder that sharing the land with carnivores can be a complicated affair.

For conservation scientists like me, it also underscored that Americans have a fraught relationship with large carnivores like wolves, bears and mountain lions. My colleagues and I have proposed a federal policy that, when combined with other initiatives, could allow for sustainable coexistence between people and carnivores.

Major state and federal government efforts are underway to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Northern Cascades and gray wolves to Colorado. These are places where stable populations of these animals have not roamed for many decades.

More human development and, in some cases, expanding carnivore populations have led to more encounters between humans and carnivores. Coyote attacks on pets are more common, alligator bites are on the rise in some regions, and the killing of livestock by wolves has spread.

Increasing conflict with these species may unravel decades of conservation success.

From conflict to coexistence

To manage these risks, people too often default to the widespread killing of carnivores. In 2021 alone, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services euthanized nearly 70,000 bears, wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes and foxes.

In the same year, controversial laws passed in Idaho and Montana that substantially reduced wolf numbers because people perceive these animals as risks to livestock production and game species hunting.

Thousands of animals die every year in wildlife killing contests that often target carnivores such as coyotes and bobcats. These contests are legal in more than 40 U.S. states – under the guise that they help with wildlife management and protect livestock.

But research has found that extensive carnivore killing to reduce levels of conflict is largely ineffective, ethically tenuous and undermines their conservation.

Instead, coexisting with carnivores can benefit both carnivores and people. For example, the presence of wolves and mountain lions lowers the frequency of vehicle collisions with deer, saving money and human lives. Foxes, likewise, reduce an abundance of small mammals that carry ticks, likely reducing cases of Lyme disease in humans. Sea otters maintain healthy kelp forests that support tourism and fisheries and capture carbon.

However, the U.S. has no unified approach for making interactions with carnivores more peaceful in the spaces that people share with them. Shared spaces – like multiuse forests and grasslands, coastlines, croplands and even cities – constitute over 70% of the continental U.S. by one estimate.

These spaces will grow more crowded as human development and population growth pushes people into greater contact with carnivores. Currently, however, the management of conflicts with carnivores is piecemeal across states and municipalities. It lacks sufficient resources and polarizes the public over how to manage these animals in the future.

And mitigating conflict as a policy objective is a short-term and partial solution that doesn’t enable long-term coexistence.

Policy for enabling coexistence

A federal policy like the one my colleagues and I propose that sets goals for sharing spaces with carnivores could allow for coexistence between people and carnivores while also recognizing local priorities.

While much of wildlife management takes place at the state level, having a federal policy framework could provide resources and incentives for states and communities to adopt specific coexistence strategies relevant to the carnivores in their area.

Large-scale policy goals may include lowering conflicts, increasing human tolerance to risks and fostering self-sustaining carnivore populations.

Coexistence strategies should prioritize using proven, nonlethal deterrence methods such as properly disposing of trash or other attractants, bringing pets inside, erecting barriers to separate livestock from carnivores in risky places and times, and working with guard animals such as dogs that are trained to protect herds from carnivores. These strategies not only reduce carnivores’ impact on human property and well-being but also facilitate carnivore recovery.

Several local projects demonstrate that nonlethal deterrence programs work. In Montana’s Blackfoot watershed, natural resource managers and local residents coordinate the disposal of livestock carcasses away from ranches. This prevents grizzlies and wolves from approaching the ranches.

The city of Durango, Colorado, has supplied its residents with automatically locking bear-resistant trash containers. These containers keep bears from damaging property or scaring residents while looking for food in them. A study found that these new trash containers reduced trash-related conflicts with bears by 60%.

Negative encounters with carnivores still occur in these cases, but now that the communities are collectively adapting to them, they are less severe. And these carnivores are less likely to be euthanized.

Some states are also taking incremental steps toward coexistence. For example, to reduce animal suffering, New Mexico passed the Wildlife Conservation and Public Safety Act in 2021 that bans the use of a trap, snare or poison to kill an animal on public land.

In 2023, Maryland and Colorado authorized provisions that help fund provisions to prevent lethal encounters with black bears and gray wolves, respectively.

A broader coexistence framework

These local and state-level successes are encouraging, but not enough to address the issue at a broader, national scale. A federal coexistence policy could harness the insights from these individual communities’ coexistence efforts and encourage other communities to adopt these techniques.

For example, members of universities, businesses, tribes, government and nongovernmental organizations and the public could come together at regional coexistence workshops to showcase their coexistence actions, receive support for new ideas and share tools and best practices.

A federal policy could allow states and communities to try out high-risk, high-reward initiatives, like Pay for Presence programs. One such program, established in northern Mexico near the U.S. border in 2007, compensates landowners for the documented presence of jaguars on their properties.

A federal policy might also facilitate the adoption of market-based solutions like predator-friendly meats. The predator-friendly certification enables ranchers who do not use lethal predator control to sell their meat products at a premium price.

A federal coexistence policy could also support community outreach and education programs. Teaching communities about carnivore behavior can help them to avoid potentially risky situations, like jogging with a dog or leaving children unattended in mountain lion territory.

By reducing negative encounters, these programs can enhance the adoption of nonlethal coexistence strategies, foster more positive attitudes toward carnivores and share the benefits carnivores offer humans.

There are promising signs that the federal government and some states are starting to pay more attention to coexistence with carnivores. As the segment of the American public that views wildlife as deserving of rights and compassion grows, translating an ethic of coexistence into good policy could better align policy with public values.

Neil Carter, Associate Professor of Wildlife Conservation, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The space industry has changed dramatically since the Apollo program put men on the moon in the late 1960s.

Today, over 50 years later, private companies are sending tourists to the edge of space and building lunar landers. NASA is bringing together 27 countries to peacefully explore the Moon and beyond, and it is using the James Webb Space Telescope to peer back in time. Private companies are playing a much larger role in space than they ever have before, though NASA and other government interests continue to drive scientific advances.

I’m a macroeconomist who’s interested in understanding how these space-related innovations and the growing role of private industry have affected the economy. Recently, the U.S. government started tracking the space economy’s size. These data can tell us the size of the space-related industry, whether its outputs come mainly from government or private enterprise, and how they have been growing relative to the economy at large.

Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic made up over 80% of the U.S. space economy in 2021. The government held a 19% share of space spending, up from 16% in 2012 – mostly thanks to an increase in military spending.

Ways to measure the space economy

There are many ways to measure economic success in space.

One way is the economic impact. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, which tracks the nation’s gross domestic product and other indicators, recently began to monitor the space economy and published figures from 2012 to 2021. The Bureau of Economic Analysis calculated the impact of space using both broad and narrow definitions.

The broad definition comprises four parts: things used in space, like rocket ships; items supporting space travel, like launch pads; things getting direct input from space, like cell phone GPS chips; and space education, like planetariums and college astrophysics departments.

In 2021, the broad definition showed that total space-related sales, or what the government calls gross output, was over US$210 billion, before adjusting for inflation. That number represents about 0.5% of the whole U.S. economy’s total gross output.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis also has a narrow definition that excludes satellite television, satellite radio and space education. The difference in definitions is important because back in 2012 these three categories represented one-quarter of all space spending. However, by 2021, they only represented one-eighth of spending because many people had switched from watching satellite TV to streaming movies and shows over the internet.

Space’s share of the economy

A closer look at the data shows that space’s share of the U.S. economy is shrinking.

Using the broad definition and adjusting for inflation, the relative size of the space economy fell by about one-fifth from 2012 to 2021. This is because sales of space-related items – everything from rockets to satellite TV – have barely changed since 2015.

Using the narrow definition also shows the space economy is getting relatively smaller. From 2012 to 2021, the space sector’s inflation-adjusted gross output grew on average 3% a year, compared with 5% for the overall economy. This suggests space is not growing as fast as other economic sectors.

Space jobs

The number of jobs created by the space economy has also declined. In 2021, 360,000 people worked full- or part-time space-related jobs in the private sector, down from 372,000 about a decade earlier, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis could not track all space-related government jobs since spy agencies and parts of the military don’t provide much information. Nevertheless, it has tracked some since 2018. The military’s Space Force, which is the smallest branch, adds about 9,000 workers. NASA has about 18,000 employees, which is half of its 1960s peak.

Combining these government workers plus all private workers results in just under 400,000 people. To give some perspective, Amazon’s U.S. workforce is over twice as big and Walmart’s is four times bigger than reported U.S. space-related employment.

Growing competition in space

The U.S. has long dominated the space economy, especially in terms of government spending.

The U.S. government spent a little more than $40 billion in 2017, compared with about $3.5 billion spent by Japan and less than $2 billion by Russia.

Moreover, most of the top private space companies are based in the U.S., led by Boeing, SpaceX and Raytheon, which gives the U.S. a leg up in continuing to play a leading role with the rockets, satellites and other stuff needed to operate in space.

The U.S. also published more than twice the amount of space research in 2017 as its next nearest rival – China.

But China is catching up and has narrowed the gap in recent years as top Chinese officials decided success in space is a national priority. Their goal is reportedly to surpass the U.S. as the dominant space power by 2045. China recently put a large space station called the Tiangong into orbit and aims to put people on the Moon.

China’s not the only one joining the 21st century space race. India is expanding its space economy rapidly, with 140 space-tech startups. India launched a rocket on July 14, 2023, designed to put a lander and rover on the Moon. And the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft plans to map parts of the universe to study dark matter. The ESA released the craft’s first test images at the end of July 2023.

The U.S. has a strong foothold in space. But whether it can maintain its lead – as the space race moves into a new frontier of space mining and missions to Mars – remains to be seen.

Jay L. Zagorsky, Clinical Associate Professor of Markets, Public Policy and Law, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Humans have learned to fear wildfire. It can destroy communities, torch pristine forests and choke even faraway cities with toxic smoke.

Wildfire is scary for good reason, and over a century of fire suppression efforts has conditioned people to expect wildland firefighters to snuff it out. But as journalist Nick Mott and I explore our new book, “This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Your Home, Yourself, and Your Community in the Age of Heat,” and in our podcast “Fireline,” this expectation and the approach to wildfire will have to change.

Over time, extensive fire suppression has set the stage for the increasingly destructive wildfires we see today.

The problem with fighting every fire

The way the U.S. deals with wildfires today dates back to around 1910, when the Great Burn torched some 3 million acres across Washington, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia. After watching the fire’s swift and unstoppable spread, the fledgling Forest Service developed a military-style apparatus built to eradicate wildfire.

The U.S. got really good at putting out fires. So good that citizens grew to accept fire suppression as something the government simply does.

Today, state, federal and private firefighters deploy across the country when fires break out, along with tankers, bulldozers, helicopters and planes. The Forest Service touts a record of snuffing out 98% of wildfires before they reach 100 acres (40 hectares).

As a result, many forest ecosystems that would have periodically burned have become clogged with underbrush, new growth and woody debris that can easily ignite. Efforts by the Forest Service to adopt a more selective policy have run into opposition from Western politicians.

At the same time, people have built more homes and cities in fire-prone areas. And the greenhouse gases released by decades of increasingly burning fossil fuels have caused global temperatures to rise.

Climate change and wildfires

The relationship between climate and wildfire is fairly simple: Higher temperatures lead to more fire. Higher temperatures increase moisture evaporation, drying out plants and soil and making them more likely to burn. When hot, dry winds are blowing, a spark in an already dry area can quickly blow up into dangerous wildfire.

Given the rise in global temperatures that the world has already experienced, much of the Western U.S. is actually in a fire deficit because of the practice of suppressing most fires. That means that, based on historical data, we should expect far more fire than we’re actually seeing.

Fortunately, there are things everyone can do to break this cycle.

What fire managers can do

First, everyone can accept that firefighters can’t and shouldn’t put out every low-risk wildfire.

Remote fires that pose little threat to communities and property can breathe life into ecosystems. Low-level fires that clear out undergrowth but don’t kill the trees create space for trees, plants and wildlife species to thrive, and they return nutrients to the soil. Some tree and plant species depend on fires to open their seeds to reproduce.

Natural fires can also help avoid catastrophic fires that occur when too much underbrush has built up for fuel. And they create fuel breaks on the landscape that could halt the advance of future flames.

Fire managers have advanced mapping technology that can help them decide when and where forests can burn safely. Thoughtful prescribed burning – meaning low-intensity fires intentionally set by professionals – can offer many of the same benefits as the flames that historically burned in forests and grasslands.

The Forest Service is aiming to ramp up its prescribed burning on more acres in more areas across the country. However, the agency struggles to train adequate staff and pay for the projects, and environmental reviews sometimes cause yearslong delays. Other groups offer beacons of hope. Indigenous groups across the country, for example, are returning fire to the landscape.

Adapting homes to fire risk

For decades, scientists have understood the relationship between wildfire and community destruction. However, little has been done to live safely with fire on the ground. More than one-third of U.S. homes are in what’s known as the wildland-urban interface – the zone where houses and other structures intermingle with flammable vegetation.

The biggest risk to homes comes from burning embers blowing on the wind and landing in weak spots that can set a house ablaze. Those embers can travel over a miles to nestle in dry leaves or pine needles clogging a gutter, a wood-shingle roof or shrubs, trees and other flammable vegetation close to a structure.

Some of these vulnerabilities are easy to fix. Cleaning a home’s gutters or trimming back too-close vegetation requires little effort and tools already around the house.

Grant programs exist to help harden homes against wildfire. But enormous investment is needed to get the work done at the scale the fire risk requires. For example, nearly 1 million U.S. homes in wildfire-prone areas have highly combustible wooden roofs. Retrofitting those roofs will cost an estimated US$6 billion, but that investment could both saves lives and property and reduce wildfire management costs in the future.

Homeowners can look to resources like Firewise USA to learn about the “home ignition zone.” It describes the types of vegetation and other flammable objects that become high risks at different distances from a structure and steps to make properties more fire resilient.

For example, homes should not have flammable plants, firewood, dried leaves or needles, or anything burnable, on or under decks and porches within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of the house. Between 5 and 30 feet (9 meters), grasses should be mowed short, tree branches should be pruned to at least 6 feet (2 meters) from the ground, and the tree canopy should be at least 10 feet (3 meters) from the structure.

What communities can do

Many counties and cities have their own wildfire programs to educate homeowners and connect them with resources. Some have started “tool libraries” to help anyone begin the necessary work on their property.

Beyond individual actions, states and communities can enact forward-looking wildfire resilience policies.

These can include developing zoning rules and regulations that require developers to build with fire-resistant materials and designs or might even prohibit building in areas where the risk is too high. The International Wildland-Urban Interface Code, which provides guidance for safeguarding homes and communities from wildfire, has been adopted in jurisdictions in at least 24 states.

Living in a world with wildfire

Prevention and suppression will always be critical pieces of wildfire strategy, but adapting to our fiery future means everyone has a role.

Educate yourself on proposed forest projects in your area. Understand and address risks to your home and community. Help your neighbors. Advocate for better wildfire planning, policy and resources.

Living in a world where more wildfire is inevitable requires that everyone see themselves as part of solving the problem. Wildfire can be terrifying, but also natural and essential. Embracing both isn’t always easy, but I believe it is the only way forward.

Justin Angle, Professor of Marketing, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.