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A national pharmaceutical company on Thursday donated 60,000 drug-deactivation pouches to help combat prescription opioid abuse in Southern Nevada through a new partnership with Roseman University of Health Sciences...Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals also will help...distribute the pouches to local families for free at health fairs and drug abuse education events...The pouches, which can hold up to 45 pills, are designed to render prescription opioids safe for disposal by using carbon to deactivate the active ingredients. Users can then fill the pouch with water, seal it and safely throw it in the trash without fear of contaminating the environment or having someone consuming the discarded drugs…The pouches are just one way that state officials, educators and health-care experts are attacking the high number of prescription drug-related deaths in the state.

The dearth of hospitals is just one of the issues threatening the well-being of the roughly 300,000 Nevadans who...live in small towns like Tonopah and other rural communities. A shortage of medical professionals, an increasingly strained emergency care network and escalating costs of health care are threatening to turn them into health-care "have-nots" who pay a steep price for their rural lifestyle...The problem is not limited to Nevada. Across the nation, residents of rural areas are experiencing health-outcome disparities, including "higher incidence of disease and disability, increased mortality rates, lower life expectancies and higher rates of pain and suffering...Rural residents are themselves a public health challenge, as they are generally older, more isolated and less likely to be covered by insurance than their urban counterparts. They’re also more likely to smoke, suffer from obesity and hypertension and die from complications of diabetes.

A prominent organization of defense lawyers in Las Vegas this week formed a committee to explore ways of challenging local law enforcement’s methods for gaining drug convictions...The committee, set up by the Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice, will look at the use of what are known as chemical field tests, inexpensive kits used by police and prosecutors to make drug arrests and gain guilty pleas. Officers typically drop suspicious materials into a chemical pouch and look for telltale shifts in color ostensibly meant to indicate the possible presence of illegal drugs. The tests are often the only evidence used to win convictions...The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department crime lab had submitted a formal report detailing the shortcomings of the tests to federal authorities in 2014, and yet to this day the lab still endorses the use of the tests in criminal prosecutions...

Experts from across the valley have taken a hard look at both the city and state’s mental health care situation, and most agreed that, in order to fix things, it will take time, new professionals and lots of money...Nevada has the fewest clinicians of any state — that’s providers who can sit with you and know what to do. In Nevada, only one in three adults that has mental illness will be able to get help. Only one in two children who have severe mental illness can get any help. There’s not enough of us to go around....the shortage of professionals is the root of many of the problems...part of that is infighting between various designations of health care professionals, which ultimately leads to state licensing complications...We don’t have enough professionals, and when professionals try to move here from out of state, we don’t certify them so they can get to work...positive sign that the Nevada Legislature is discussing collapsing all of the licensing boards — for anything to do with behavioral health — into one entity...our system is so poor that most professionals are celebrating this. We believe it will streamline the system, provide resources and bring professionals into the field...

Renown Health is expanding its video health consultation network to four rural hospitals in Nevada...The videoconferencing service, known as telehealth, allows doctors in Reno to connect with patients in rural areas who may not have access to specialty services, like neurology or pediatrics...Kirk Gillis is the vice president for accountable care with Renown, and he says the need for specialty care in rural areas is critical...“A patient in a rural community, and their primary care provider in that community said, ‘You need to see a specialist.’ The nearest specialist is 200 miles away in Reno, Nevada. They may or may not forego that care, because they may or may not be able to make that trip,” he says...Four hospitals in Nevada have joined the network, including those in Lovelock, Hawthorne, Battle Mountain and Caliente.

The patient killed in Friday night’s fiery medical plane crash was a miner who was planning to retire soon, and the nurse was an Elko woman who got her "dream job" with American Medflight just a few weeks ago and was recently engaged to be married...They were two of four victims killed when an American Medflight plane crashed into the Barrick Gold Corp. parking lot...Also killed were the pilot...Yuji Irie; and paramedic Jake Shepherd of Utah.

• Edward Clohesey - 67, was a Spring Creek resident and a heavy equipment operator at Bald Mountain...Clohesey was experiencing chest pains and rapid heartbeat...after which the decision was made to transport him to a hospital in Utah for open heart surgery.
• Tiffany Urresti - 29, was a flight nurse who had been with American Medflight for about a month...she had worked as an emergency room nurse at Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital before that.
• Jake Shepherd was a paramedic for Mountain West Medical Center in Tooele County, Utah.
• Yuji Irie – 63, saved hundreds of lives over a long career at American Medflight. He was based in Ely, Nevada, the toughest base for inclement weather in the American Medflight system.

A long-running debate in Nevada’s medical community is heating up, with doctors challenging a new regulation that would enable dental hygienists to administer Botox to patients for either medical or cosmetic reasons...The State Board of Dental Examiners...last month approved rules that would extend the privilege to licensed dental hygienists...But the Nevada State Medical Association, which represents the state’s practicing physicians, is pushing back. It says use of the toxin should not be extended to dental hygienists, who can be licensed after as little as two years of study at an accredited college, and that dentists should be restricted to applying it to certain areas of the head...Dentists...have called the dispute a "turf war," arguing that physicians are attempting to protect a lucrative and increasingly common medical procedure.

As insurance companies nationwide look for ways to cut costs, commissions for individual plans have been reduced and in some cases eliminated...That has led many of the hundreds of brokers and agents in Nevada to focus on other more-profitable sectors and made it harder for shoppers to find help navigating the complicated and confusing marketplaces for individual health insurance, either private or via the Affordable Care Act exchange...On the Silver State Health Insurance Exchange, the state’s official portal for so-called Obamacare plans, the number of brokers and agents registered to assist users declined from roughly 500 last year to about 150 this year…Nevada’s largest insurer, UnitedHealthCare, said that it will still pay commissions on renewals, though at a lower rate, but not on new policies...Our actions are consistent with our long-stated approach to continually evaluate the dynamics of the market as they evolve, and to refocus our resources as necessary so that we can provide consumers with access to quality care…

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval told the state dental board to address problems with its patient-complaint-resolution process at a heated meeting...in which dental professionals accused the regulators of corruption, bullying and extortion...“There’s something not right here and it needs to be fixed,” the Republican governor said after hearing complaints and tearful accounts about the alleged problems...The current process...left dentists and other practitioners believing they either had to accept a settlement agreement or risk steeper punishment if found at fault during a final board hearing...Either pay me now or we’ll look into it deeper and you’ll pay me more...

Most of Nevada’s hospitals are struggling to make the grade when it comes to patient safety, according to a new report by a national health-care watchdog that placed the state near the bottom of its rankings...The hospital safety grades report, compiled twice annually by nonprofit The Leapfrog Group, ranked Nevada 43rd out of 49 states and Washington, D.C., in terms of the percentage of hospitals earning A grades under its 30-component ranking system...three of Nevada’s 20 ranked hospitals received A’s for patient safety — all of them in Northern Nevada. Four received B’s, and 13 received C’s. No Nevada hospitals received a D or F...In Southern Nevada, three hospitals received B’s and 10 were awarded C’s. The results, released late Sunday, were an improvement for Nevada from Leapfrog’s last report this spring, when only one of 19 ranked hospitals — Renown South Meadows Medical Center in Reno — earned an A and Nevada ranked 46th overall...