Latest news with #PVA
Malaysian Reserve
07-07-2025
- Health
- Malaysian Reserve
Paralyzed Veterans of America Releases Statement Following Department of Veterans Affairs' Announcement Not to Pursue Large-Scale Reduction-in-Force
WASHINGTON, July 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Paralyzed Veterans of America Chief Executive Officer Carl Blake releases statement following the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announcement that it will no longer pursue a large-scale reduction-in-force as part of its efforts to reduce VA staffing, while also improving the delivery of health care, benefits, and burial services to veterans. 'The VA indicated today that its workforce would see a reduction of approximately 30,000 staff from its starting level at the beginning of FY2025 to the end of this fiscal year in September. PVA's highest priority remains the timely delivery of high-quality health care and earned benefits for veterans with spinal cord injuries or diseases, like ALS and MS. Our concerns are not simply about numbers on an org chart but rather the quality of life, independence, and well-being of our nation's veterans. 'We look forward to continuing to work with VA Secretary Collins and his team on their commitment to deliver the best outcomes for all veterans and ensure the availability of resources needed to fill any gaps. As PVA shared with Secretary Collins earlier this year, there are opportunities for meaningful realignment of resources within VA, even if that means reduction in areas that do not improve upon mission delivery for VA.' About Paralyzed Veterans of AmericaParalyzed Veterans of America is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and the only congressionally chartered veterans service organization dedicated solely for the benefit and representation of veterans with spinal cord injury or diseases. The organization ensures veterans receive the benefits earned through service to our nation; monitors their care in VA spinal cord injury units; and funds research and education in the search for a cure and improved care for individuals with a life-long partner and advocate for veterans and all people with disabilities, PVA also develops training and career services, works to ensure accessibility in public buildings and spaces, and provides health and rehabilitation opportunities through sports and recreation. With more than 70 offices and 33 chapters, Paralyzed Veterans of America serves veterans, their families, and their caregivers in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Learn more at Contact: Oname Thompson 703-864-5980 cellOnameT@
Scoop
19-05-2025
- Health
- Scoop
More Doctorless Or Closed Hospitals In NZ?
Press Release: Patient Voice Aotearoa (PVA) has been provided information, detailing the extreme staff shortages rural hospitals in New Zealand are faced with. The following table shows the advertised need for locums in our rural hospitals over the coming months. A description of 'open to any availability' or 'open to availability', means the hospital is in extreme need of one or more locums. PVA is aware that the three hospitals that are in the Far North (Dargaville, Bay of Islands, and Kaitaia) have been doctorless and have relied on telehealth services when patients have presented to ED. Gisborne Hospital has the highest doctor vacancy rate in the country at 44%, and Southland Hospital is experiencing a shortage of 18%. Nelson Hospital's staffing woes have been well reported over the past few months, with patients missing out on vital procedures and operations. Te Rau Kawakawa (Westport) had shut its doors for a month during the first year of operation for the new facility last year, as did Oamaru Hospital several times in 2023 after being unable to source a locum. Last year, a shortage of doctors at Greymouth Hospital almost saw the facility shut its doors in November, and more than once staff at Taupo Hospital had to draw contingency plans to shut their doors over the course of the previous year, again due to the shortage of doctors. Masterton Hospital ED has had to 'effectively close their doors' due to there being no beds available to admit patients to, was short by some 40 nurses last year, and had two orthopaedic surgeons resign. Whakatane has had to close its obstetrics and gynaecology service due to having no specialists in the field, and hospital staff now fear the closure of the mental health ward due to only having one psychiatrist. Whakatane ED will be staffed up to 50% when three American doctors arrive in August and September this year and the hospital only has one orthopaedic specialist on call for three or four days a week. Thames Hospital has been reliant on locums for some time, as they require over 12 full time equivalent senior medical officers and only have just over 5, and they are also short of medical officers. Timaru Hospital is struggling to recruit doctors in the fields of palliative care and anaesthesia. Wairau Hospital is low on staff overall and is struggling to recruit more, especially into paediatric care. States Chair of PVA, Malcolm Mulholland, who has been touring the country and engaging with hospital staff from rural hospitals 'It's bad enough to be so reliant on locums, but what happens if these positions cannot be filled? Are hospitals then reliant on resident medical officers, a nurse, or telehealth services? Will hospitals be doctorless or shut, as has the case in the Far North, Westport or Oamaru? Yesterday the Minister of Health announced a plan for 24/7 urgent care services. Some of the locations listed are where rural hospitals are situated that are struggling to recruit doctors. What will happen if an urgent care doctor refers a patient to a local hospital where there is no doctor? I sincerely hope that this week's budget deals with the real issue of why we can't recruit and retain doctors in our hospitals. Our government needs to pay them substantially more, so we can compete on the international market to attract their services, which in turn, will hopefully create a critical mass of doctors. If the Government fails to tackle the issue, we will start to see more doctorless hospitals or more hospitals shut their doors.
Scoop
19-05-2025
- Health
- Scoop
More Doctorless Or Closed Hospitals In NZ?
Press Release: Patient Voice Aotearoa (PVA) has been provided information, detailing the extreme staff shortages rural hospitals in New Zealand are faced with. The following table shows the advertised need for locums in our rural hospitals over the coming months. A description of 'open to any availability' or 'open to availability', means the hospital is in extreme need of one or more locums. PVA is aware that the three hospitals that are in the Far North (Dargaville, Bay of Islands, and Kaitaia) have been doctorless and have relied on telehealth services when patients have presented to ED. Gisborne Hospital has the highest doctor vacancy rate in the country at 44%, and Southland Hospital is experiencing a shortage of 18%. Nelson Hospital's staffing woes have been well reported over the past few months, with patients missing out on vital procedures and operations. Te Rau Kawakawa (Westport) had shut its doors for a month during the first year of operation for the new facility last year, as did Oamaru Hospital several times in 2023 after being unable to source a locum. Last year, a shortage of doctors at Greymouth Hospital almost saw the facility shut its doors in November, and more than once staff at Taupo Hospital had to draw contingency plans to shut their doors over the course of the previous year, again due to the shortage of doctors. Masterton Hospital ED has had to 'effectively close their doors' due to there being no beds available to admit patients to, was short by some 40 nurses last year, and had two orthopaedic surgeons resign. Whakatane has had to close its obstetrics and gynaecology service due to having no specialists in the field, and hospital staff now fear the closure of the mental health ward due to only having one psychiatrist. Whakatane ED will be staffed up to 50% when three American doctors arrive in August and September this year and the hospital only has one orthopaedic specialist on call for three or four days a week. Thames Hospital has been reliant on locums for some time, as they require over 12 full time equivalent senior medical officers and only have just over 5, and they are also short of medical officers. Timaru Hospital is struggling to recruit doctors in the fields of palliative care and anaesthesia. Wairau Hospital is low on staff overall and is struggling to recruit more, especially into paediatric care. States Chair of PVA, Malcolm Mulholland, who has been touring the country and engaging with hospital staff from rural hospitals 'It's bad enough to be so reliant on locums, but what happens if these positions cannot be filled? Are hospitals then reliant on resident medical officers, a nurse, or telehealth services? Will hospitals be doctorless or shut, as has the case in the Far North, Westport or Oamaru? Yesterday the Minister of Health announced a plan for 24/7 urgent care services. Some of the locations listed are where rural hospitals are situated that are struggling to recruit doctors. What will happen if an urgent care doctor refers a patient to a local hospital where there is no doctor? I sincerely hope that this week's budget deals with the real issue of why we can't recruit and retain doctors in our hospitals. Our government needs to pay them substantially more, so we can compete on the international market to attract their services, which in turn, will hopefully create a critical mass of doctors. If the Government fails to tackle the issue, we will start to see more doctorless hospitals or more hospitals shut their doors.
Forbes
07-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Speeding AI With Co-Processors
An artists conception of a high-speed chip Cadence Design Most chips today are built from a combination of customized logic blocks that deliver some special sauce, and off-the-shelf blocks for commonplace technologies such as I/O, memory controllers, etc. But there is one needed function that has been missing; an AI Co-Processor. In AI, the special sauce has been the circuits that do the heavy-lifting of parallel matrix operations. However, other types of operations used in AI do not lend themselves well to such matrix and tensor operators and silicon. These scalar and vector operators for computing activations and averages are typically calculated on a CPU or a digital signal processor (DSP) to speed vector operations. Designers of custom AI chips often use a network processor unit coupled with a DSP block from companies like Cadence or Synopsys to accelerate scalar and vector calculations. However, these DSPs also include many features that are irrelevant to AI. Consequently, designers are spending money and power on unneeded features. (Both Cadence and Synopsys are clients of Cambrian-AI Research.) Large companies that design custom chips address this by building in their own AI Co-Processor. Nvidia Orin Jetson uses a vector engine called PVA, Intel Gaudi uses its own vector processor within its TPCs, Qualcomm Snapdragon has its vector engine within the Hexagon accelerator, as does the Google TPU. AI Co-Processors work alongside AI matrix engines in many accelerators today. Cadence Design But what if you are an automotive, TV, or edge infrastructure company designing your own AI ASIC for a specific application? Until now, you had to either design your own co-processor, or license a DSP block and only use part of it for your AI needs. The New AI Co-Processor Building Block Cadence Design has now introduced an AI Co-Processor, called the Tensilica NeuroEdge, which can deliver roughly the same performance of a DSP but consumes 30% less die area (cost) on an SoC. Since NeuroEdge was derived from the Cadence Vision DSP platform, it is fully supported by an existing robust software stack and development environment. An AI SoC can have CPUs, AI block like GPUs, Vision processors, NPUs, and now AI co-processors to ... More accelerate the entire AI workload. Cadence Design The new co-processor can be used with any NPU, is scalable, and helps circuit design teams get to market faster with a fully tested and configurable block. Designers will combine CPUs from Arm or RISC-V, NPUs from EDA firms like Synopsys and Cadence, and now the 'AICP' from Cadence, all off-the-shelf designs and chiplets. The NeuroEdge AI Co-processor Cadence Design The AICP was born from the Vision DSP, and is configurable to meet a wide-range of compute needs. The NeuroEdge supports up to 512 8x8 MACs with FP16, 32, and BD16 support. It connects with the rest of the SoC using AXI, or using Cadence's HBDO (High-Bandwidth Interface). Cadence has high hopes for NeuroEdge in the Automotive market, and is ready for ISO 26262 Fusa certification. An architecural overview of the AI Co-Processor Cadence Design NeuroEdge fully supports the NeuroWeave AI compiler toolchain for fast development with a TVM-based front-end. The software stack for development of AI applications using the AI Co-processor. Cadence Design Our Takeaway With the rapid proliferation of AI processing in physical AI applications such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, drones, industrial automation and healthcare, NPUs are assuming a more critical role. Today, NPUs handle the bulk of the computationally intensive AI/ML workloads, but a large number of non-MAC layers include pre- and post-processing tasks that are better offloaded. Current CPU, GPU and DSP solutions required tradeoffs, and the industry needs a low-power, high-performance solution that is optimized for co-processing and allows future proofing for rapidly evolving AI processing needs. Cadence is the first to take that step. Disclosures: This article expresses the opinions of the author and is not to be taken as advice to purchase from or invest in the companies mentioned. My firm, Cambrian-AI Research, is fortunate to have many semiconductor firms as our clients, including Baya Systems BrainChip, Cadence, Cerebras Systems, D-Matrix, Esperanto, Flex, Groq, IBM, Intel, Micron, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Graphcore, Synopsys, Tenstorrent, Ventana Microsystems, and scores of investors. I have no investment positions in any of the companies mentioned in this article. For more information, please visit our website at
Associated Press
08-04-2025
- Automotive
- Associated Press
Paralyzed Veterans of America receives $1.13 million donation from Penske Automotive Group, surpassing $10 million in all-time contributions
WASHINGTON, April 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Paralyzed Veterans of America today announced it received a donation of $1.13 million from long-time partner Penske Automotive Group. The amount includes donations from customers, partners and employees of Penske Automotive Group, as well as matching contributions from the company. All the proceeds will be used to help veterans with spinal cord injuries and diseases, like MS and ALS, receive the benefits they earned, the specialized health care they need, and the meaningful careers they want. 'Paralyzed Veterans of America is grateful to our partners, like Penske Automotive Group, who are driven to make a difference in the lives of veterans living with spinal cord injuries and diseases,' said Robert Thomas, U.S. Army Veteran and National President of PVA. 'Through their generosity, PVA can provide critical resources and services, advocate for the freedoms of veterans with disabilities, and ensure the men and women who served our country have the opportunities they earned and deserve.' Since the inception of the partnership, Penske Automotive Group and its customers, partners and employees have contributed more than $10 million to PVA. This year's donation, which was part of Penske Automotive Group's Service Matters campaign, will help ensure all veterans live independent, productive lives. 'Since our partnership with PVA started in 2015, we are proud to have contributed more than $10 million and remain committed to making a meaningful difference in the lives of veterans with spinal cord injuries and diseases,' said Robert H. Kurnick, Jr., President of Penske Automotive Group. 'We are grateful to our dedicated team members, partners and loyal customers whose generosity and support continue to help drive PVA's vital mission. Together, we are strengthening our impact and empowering our heroes who have sacrificed so much for our nation.' Visit or contact a Penske Automotive Group dealership to learn more about this partnership and their Service Matters campaign. To learn more about PVA and ways you can join Penske Automotive Group in supporting disabled veterans, visit About Paralyzed Veterans of America Paralyzed Veterans of America is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and the only congressionally chartered veterans service organization dedicated solely for the benefit and representation of veterans with spinal cord injury or diseases. The organization ensures veterans receive the benefits earned through service to our nation; monitors their care in VA spinal cord injury units; and funds research and education in the search for a cure and improved care for individuals with paralysis. As a life-long partner and advocate for veterans and all people with disabilities, PVA also develops training and career services, works to ensure accessibility in public buildings and spaces, and provides health and rehabilitation opportunities through sports and recreation. With more than 70 offices and 33 chapters, Paralyzed Veterans of America serves veterans, their families, and their caregivers in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Learn more at About Penske Automotive Penske Automotive Group, Inc., (NYSE: PAG) headquartered in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is a diversified international transportation services company and one of the world's premier automotive and commercial truck retailers. PAG operates dealerships in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Australia and is one of the largest retailers of commercial trucks in North America for Freightliner. PAG also distributes and retails commercial vehicles, diesel and gas engines, power systems, and related parts and services principally in Australia and New Zealand. PAG employs over 28,900 people worldwide. Additionally, PAG owns 28.9% of Penske Transportation Solutions ('PTS'), a business that employs over 44,500 people worldwide, manages one of the largest, most comprehensive and modern trucking fleets in North America with over 435,000 trucks, tractors, and trailers under lease, rental, and/or maintenance contracts and provides innovative transportation, supply chain, and technology solutions to its customers. PAG is a member of the S&P Mid Cap 400, Fortune 500, Russell 1000, and Russell 3000 indexes. For additional information, visit the Company's website at
