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In hospitals, summer is the season when newly minted medical school graduates start their first year of residency, taking on patient care with little hands-on experience. For patients, that means a visit from a doctor who might look young and untested. To make sure residents ask for help from a senior doctor, more hospitals are developing formal “escalation-of-care” policies with clear guidelines on when it’s time to call one. Residents may fail to ask for help due to overconfidence, lack of knowledge or fear of seeming incompetent, studies show. (Landro, 8/8)

Many elderly patients like [Janet] Prochazka deteriorate mentally or physically in the hospital, even if they recover from the original illness or injury that brought them there. About one-third of patients over 70 years old and more than half of patients over 85 leave the hospital more disabled than when they arrived, research shows. As a result, many seniors are unable to care for themselves after discharge and need assistance with daily activities such as bathing, dressing or even walking. “The older you are, the worse the hospital is for you,” said Ken Covinsky, a physician and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco division of geriatrics. (Gorman, 8/9)

In his new book, David Barton Smith takes us back to the mid-1960s, when a small band of civil rights activists-cum-government bureaucrats toiled to get the nascent Medicare program up and running. In the process, they profoundly changed the way health care is delivered in this country. It stands in marked contrast to the political turmoil over health care of recent years. “In four months they transformed the nation’s hospitals from our most racially and economically segregated institutions to our most integrated,” Smith writes in “The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System. (Andrews, 8/9)

Luis Ascanio, 61, works as a medical interpreter at La Clinica del Pueblo, a D.C.-based clinic geared toward providing health care to the surrounding Latino community. Fluent in Spanish and French, he helps doctors talk with patients with limited English skills about health care issues that range from highly technical to deeply emotional. ... But according to an analysis published Monday in Health Affairs, more than a third of the nation’s hospitals in 2013 did not offer patients similar language assistance. (Heredia Rodriguez, 8/8)