Happy Friday! Here’s your NCMS Morning Rounds.

June 4, 2021

Please Share Your Experience!
The next issue of the NCMS Bulletin e-magazine will focus on health behavior and social determinants of health. We’d like to include tips on successful techniques you use to engage with your patients, establish rapport and build trust. Likewise, what barriers, if any, do you encounter in trying to build that trusting relationship with your patients? Please take just a minute to share your thoughts here. We will include selected comments in the upcoming magazine. Thank you!

Don’t forget TODAY’s Power Hour: Health Equity in Palliative and End-of-Life Care

The pandemic dramatically highlighted the depth of health disparities in our country, but illness and death rates are not the only sources of health inequity in this country. There are also substantial differences in the care that patients with serious illnesses receive near the end-of-life that are based on race or socioeconomic status.

Please join your colleagues for this week’s Kanof Institute for Physician Leadership (KIPL) Power Hour, today, June 4 at noon, when our discussion will focus on health equity as it relates to palliative and end-of-life care. Our guests will offer their insights on striving to achieve equal access to palliative and end-of-life care, addressing each patient’s unique psychological, social and spiritual needs as well as pain and symptom management. Health equity issues impact each of these areas and we invite you to explore them with us.

Learn more and register here.

Vax Up or Mask Up

NCDHHS has launched a new public campaign encouraging North Carolinians to “Vax Up or Mask Up” to support the new guidance that lifts many of the state’s COVID-19 restrictions.

The campaign provides downloadable flyers and social media graphics in both English and Spanish to help transition from the 3 Ws messaging (Wear, Wait and Wash) to the new “Vax Up or Mask Up” campaign. Materials are available for download in the COVID-19 Communications Toolkit.

Increasing Equitable Vaccine Distribution

A new tool created by NCDHHS that maps social vulnerability and vaccination rates by census tract has helped North Carolina vaccine providers increase vaccinations by 50 percent in 89 underserved communities.

“This mapping tool is another great example of how we and our providers continue to rely on data to drive our work and help every North Carolinian have easy and convenient access to a COVID-19 vaccine,” said NCDHHS Secretary Mandy K. Cohen, MD, MPH.

The department has focused on 90 census tracts identified as having high social vulnerability, low vaccination rates and no COVID-19 vaccine providers as of April 24. Of these 90 census tracts, 89 have achieved a 50 percent increase in vaccinations since April 24 with the state’s targeted outreach efforts.

The NCDHHS census tract COVID-19 map is updated weekly. For more North Carolina vaccination data, visit the state’s vaccination dashboard.

In the News

Changing the equation: Researchers remove race from a calculator for childbirth, STAT, 6-3-21

Learning Opportunity

2021 Society for Advanced Bronchoscopy (SAB) Summit – Virtual, June 12, 2021, 7:30 AM – 3 PM

This annual summit will provide updates in advanced bronchoscopy and pulmonary medicine topics provided by a diverse group of physicians to an audience of fellow physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses and respiratory therapists.