Middletown, CT-based Middlesex Hospital's new $31 million emergency department will open the week of March 24, 2008. The new wing was designed to handle a patient caseload that has jumped nearly 50 percent in the last decade, and will be three times the size of the hospital's nearly 40-year-old emergency room.
A state agency has voted for a second time to approve a 56-bed hospital that Nashville-based HCA Inc. plans to build in Spring Hill, TN. The approval essentially overturns an administrative law judge's order that had sided with Williamson Medical Center in Franklin and Maury Regional Hospital in Columbia, both of which had argued that the new hospital isn't needed.
The second phase of Naperville, IL-based Edward Hospital's $200 million makeover has won approval from the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. This portion of the project calls for two new floors at a cost of $81 million. The new third floor will have 20 intensive-care unit beds. The fourth floor will have a 38-bed neonatal intensive-care unit with 14 private rooms for premature newborns, as well as two 16-bed nurseries and a family waiting area.
Demands for wearable and stylish hospital garb are part of a growing trend, not just for patients but doctors, too. TV shows in which doctors and patients look tousled but chic are driving the trend. A handful of companies are now lining up to fill the demand.
Aetna has announced that it had suspended a plan to stop paying for routine use of a powerful anesthetic in a procedure to screen for colon cancer. The drug, propofol, provides quick and reliable sedation for patients who are undergoing a colonoscopy. Critics had said that restricting use of propofol would discourage patients from undergoing a colonoscopy. The American Gastroenterological Association, a medical society representing the doctors who perform colonoscopies, had recommended that Aetna defer its plan and praised the company for the decision.
New Jersey residents are bracing for the upheaval that Gov. Jon S. Corzine's plan to reduce the state work force by 3,000 people and eliminate three government departments is expected to cause. Cuts in charity care, for example, will probably lead to the shuttering of hospital emergency rooms serving some of the state's poorest communities.