About 160 top managers at Parkland Memorial Hospital will get a chance to split up to $2.8 million in incentive pay next year. The board of managers endorsed the 2011 executive incentive plan Tuesday, the same day it approved the public hospital's $1.2 billion budget. The incentive plan will not affect the hospital's spending plan that promises Dallas County property owners a slight tax cut next year. "The incentive plan must be self-funded," vowed John Haupert, Parkland's chief operating officer. To get the additional pay, the administrators must find a way to boost the hospital's bottom line by at least $20.6 million next year. That means finding additional revenue or cutting costs.
Real estate investment trusts (REITs) that specialize in senior and healthcare facilities have seen a rebound in 2010 with investors betting that the horde of aging baby boomers will buoy the group's long-term prospects.
Standard & Poor's is fairly bullish as well as it expects the healthcare REITs to be relatively stable over the next 12 months. The ratings agency doesn't expect these owners of healthcare and medical office properties to share in the difficulties of facility operators when it comes to reform. Instead, they should continue to generate huge cash flow from rent payments. Specifically, S&P expects private senior facilities to see growing demand and not be affected by changes in government subsidies.
Nanaimo Regional General Hospital has eliminated the latest outbreak of Clostridium difficile, after nearly five months of battling the infection that colonizes in a person's bowel and causes diarrhea, nausea and fever. The deadly disease infected 49 patients and was directly attributed to two patients' deaths since the outbreak was declared March 29. It also contributed to two other deaths. A total of 13 people who had C. difficile died during the outbreak. Overcrowding at the hospital hampered housekeepers' efforts and put an additional strain on nursing staff, who have to follow meticulous protocol visiting patients, according to infection control experts with the Vancouver Island Health Authority.The disease can be spread through hand contact or by touching contaminated surfaces and then touching your nose or mouth.
Need an X-ray or stitches? Online, via text message or flashing on a billboard, some emergency rooms are advertising how long the dreaded wait for care will be, with estimates updated every few minutes. It's a marketing move aimed at less urgent patients, not the true emergencies that automatically go to the front of the line anyway - and shouldn't waste precious minutes checking the wait. "If you're in a car accident, you're not going to flip open your iPhone and see what the wait times are," cautions Sandra Schneider, MD, president-elect of the American College of Emergency Physicians.Despite that fledgling trend, ERs are getting busier, forcing them to try innovative tactics to cut delays - such as stationing doctors at the front door to get a jump-start on certain patients.
A 2006 survey of hospitals found that 16 percent had experienced a feeding tube mix-up. Experts and standards groups have advocated since 1996 that tubes for different functions be made incompatible, just as different nozzles at gas stations prevent drivers from using the wrong fuel.
But action has been delayed by resistance from the medical-device industry and an approval process at the Food and Drug Administration that can discourage safety-related changes. Hospitals, tube manufacturers, regulators and standards groups all point fingers at one another to explain the delay. Hospitalized patients often have an array of clear plastic tubing sticking out of their bodies to deliver or extract medicine, nutrition, fluids, gases or blood to veins, arteries, stomachs, skin, lungs or bladders.
Much of the tubing is interchangeable, and with nurses connecting and disconnecting dozens each day, mix-ups happen, sometimes with deadly consequences.
If elected governor, Republican Meg Whitman plans to add California to the list of states suing to overturn the new federal health care law. Or maybe she won't. The most recent statements by Whitman's campaign are much more equivocal than the position she took in March, during the Republican primary. When supporters at a campaign event asked her whether she would "force (her) attorney general" to join the healthcare suit, she said yes. Questioned by reporters later that day, Whitman acknowledged that a governor couldn't order the independently elected attorney general to sue, but said she would "strongly encourage" a suit. Last week, however, campaign spokesman Darrel Ng said Whitman might not take either of those actions, even though she still objects to parts of the new law.