In a statement, representatives from the American Medical Association say a "sneak attack" on specialty hospitals in the farm bill will hurt patients. "Opponents of physician-owned specialty hospitals are trying to slip a provision to ban specialty hospitals into the farm bill conference report, well after the bill has been passed by both the House and Senate," said William G. Plested III, MD, AMA Immediate Past-President, in a statement. "It is bad policy to take away patients' healthcare choices by banning specialty hospitals-especially under the cover of the farm bill," he added.
A startling number of people—especially women—living primarily in the Deep South and in Appalachia saw a drop in life spans beginning in 1983, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health. The study found that found that 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population experienced either declines or stagnation in their life expectancy in the ’80s and ’90s. In addition to race and poverty, other contributing factors include an increase in diabetes, cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, researchers said.
New research shows that in hospitals and other healthcare facilities with MRSA, aggressive screening of healthcare workers should be combined with other measures to help reduce infection rates. The study’s authors looked at data from 169 studies of 33,318 healthcare workers in 37 countries, and found that 4.6 percent of the workers carried MRSA and, of these, 5.1 percent had clinical MRSA infections.
The New York Immigration Coalition and other groups have released a report on the availability of language assistance at city hospitals for non-English-speaking patients. The report says that such help at hospitals seems to have improved since 2006, when state health officials began regulating communication between hospitals and their non-English-speaking patients. Much more still needs to be done, however, particularly regarding languages such as Korean, Haitian Creole, Russian, Arabic and Bengali, the report states.
The federal government is not doing enough to protect patients from hospital infections, and as a result is endangering tens of thousands of lives and costing billions of dollars, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Although private groups demand steps such as requiring doctors and nurses to wash their hands, the government has not established sufficient standards for hospitals to follow or prodded hospitals to follow those standards to reduce infections, the GAO added in the report. The GAO report urged the government to prioritize its standards and improve data collection.
The death of a 76-year-old man and a list of other violations triggered an investigation that almost cost Louisburg, NC-based Franklin Regional Medical Center its federal dollars to treat poor and elderly patients. Franklin Regional was found by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to have acted unacceptably after the elderly patient arrived at the hospital for an elective knee surgery and complained to the nurse that he had chest pains and loss of feeling in his left arm. The man died of heart failure the following day. The case is one of several failures outlined in a 44-page report from the CMS, resulting in a threat to pull Franklin Regional's federal funding, a major revenue stream for the hospital.