Members of the Montgomery County, PA, bar association and medical society, along with Abington Memorial Hospital, are launching a pilot project they hope will keep more malpractice disputes out of court. Lawyers and doctors will work in teams to mediate conflicts between patients and the hospital or doctors to try to resolve problems more quickly and humanely. John J. Kelly, Abington Memorial's chief of staff, said that instead of saving money, he wants to avoid the "harshness" of litigation.
Iowa Lt. Governor Patty Judge has released a report by a task force charged with developing recommendations to make Iowa a better place for nursing professionals. The report outlines challenges faced by nurses in the state, and recommends what can be done to overcome them. Some of the changes suggested in the report include improving educational programs, increasing nursing faculty, and encouraging public health facilities to increase nursing wages and meet national salary averages.
Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston will unveil a new name, dropping "New England" and emphasizing the hospital's ties to Tufts University. The medical center will use part of the official university logo, and its pediatric affiliate for children will become Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center. The rebranding will be accompanied by new signage to help make the medical school's campus appear more cohesive and by a $1.5 million advertising campaign to reintroduce Boston's oldest hospital.
Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray has proposed a total ban on all gifts and freebies to doctors from pharmaceutical companies. If approved, the move would make Massachusetts the first state in the country to ban such gifts outright. The measure is part of a set of healthcare reform measures Murray filed in a bill that also includes requiring all doctors statewide to adopt electronic medical records by 2015, allowing patients to choose nurse practitioners as primary care providers, and forcing public reviews of any insurance company efforts to boost annual premiums by more than 7 percent.
An outbreak of hepatitis C at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada may represent "the tip of an iceberg" of safety problems at clinics around the country, according to the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nevada health officials are trying to contact about 40,000 patients who received anesthesia by injection at the clinic between March 2004 and Jan. 11 to urge them to get tested. Healthcare accreditors "would consider this a patient safety error that falls into the category of a 'never event,' meaning this should never happen in contemporary healthcare organizations," said CDC head Julie Gerberding.
Some say the recent defeat of two MRSA bills in Maryland leaves thousands of hospital and nursing home patients more vulnerable to the deadly pathogen. Michael Bennett, director of the Coalition for Patients Rights said he was "shocked, befuddled and dismayed at the duplicity of the healthcare leadership and how they're responding to this crisis." According to the Maryland Hospital Association, however, the legislation was flawed.