Dr. Tai-Seale joins national health services research organization

Ming Tai-Seale, Ph.D., M.P.H., associate professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health, recently was chosen to serve as chair-elect within the AcademyHealth Organization, the premier professional organization in her field.

The AcademyHealth Organization is a national organization for health services researchers, policy analysts and practitioners. It contains several interest groups covering a broad range of health research and policy interests. The largest is the Health Economics Interest Group, with more than 2,000 members and of which Dr. Tai-Seale has been as a member of its advisory board for the past three years and is now chair-elect.

The group is dedicated to promoting excellence in health economics research, providing a forum for emerging ideas and empirical results of health economics research, and fostering the development and dissemination of the best health economics research to influence health policy and clinical practice.

“AcademyHealth has been my professional home since the beginning of my career,” Dr. Tai-Seale said. “I have benefited a great deal from sharing ideas with fellow health economists. It is an honor to be asked to serve the Health Economics Interest Group as the chair-elect. I look forward to working with the interest group members and other volunteer members of the advisory board to advance the field.”

The Texas A&M Health Science Center provides the state with health education, outreach and research. Its six colleges located in communities throughout Texas are Baylor College of Dentistry, the College of Medicine, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, the Institute of Biosciences and Technology, the Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy, and the School of Rural Public Health.

Aging: Mental Health Overlooked in Care of Elderly Patients

Depression and other mental illnesses are common among the elderly, and when they get treatment, it usually comes from their primary care doctors. But a new study suggests that those doctors may devote too little time to talking about those ailments.

When researchers reviewed videotapes of 385 appointments with elderly patients in three separate areas, they found the median time spent discussing mental health was just two minutes.

The study, which appeared in the December issue of The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, was led by Ming Tai-Seale of the School of Rural Public Health at Texas A&M.

More than half the patients whose survey responses suggested they were depressed never spoke with their doctors at all about their emotional state. The subject came up in about a fifth of the visits over all.

But even when patients let their doctors know about their problems, the study found, the responses were often ineffective or worse.

-ERIC NAGOURNEY, New York Times