Sometime after 2 a.m. on January 12, 2016, Aja Newman roused herself from her hospital gurney and made her way down the long hallway to the bathroom. She had checked in at Mount Sinai’s Emergency Department more than four hours earlier with severe shoulder pain. Aja is a practical person and had been reluctant at first. “Emergency rooms are for emergencies is what I was taught,” she says.
Montefiore Health System announced today it will close its Mount Vernon Hospital and replace it with a new $41 million emergency and ambulatory facility. The construction and opening of the new emergency care center on Sandford Boulevard will result in the closing of the 121-bed Mount Vernon Hospital sometime late next year, the hospital system said.
A critical drug that serves as the backbone of treatment for most childhood cancers, including leukemias, lymphomas and brain tumors, has become increasingly scarce, and doctors are warning that they may soon be forced to consider rationing doses.
The use of the anesthesia propofol puts patients to sleep faster, brings them out of their oblivion more quickly and may help doctors find more precancerous polyps during a colonoscopy than the traditional means of sedation. But do those benefits justify the $300 to $500 extra cost per patient?
It is officially flu season and doctors said one strain of the flu is expected to be especially severe this year. That strain is called the H3N2 strain. This year, flu season is expected to last from October until May. Doctors recommend getting the flu shot as early as possible. Anyone who is older than six months old can get a flu shot. It is scientifically proven to help protect you. The vaccine has an inactive virus that helps your body build up immunity to the flu.
It’s such a common routine in a doctor’s office or clinic or hospital that patients tend to comply without thinking: Step on the scale, roll up your sleeve for the blood pressure cuff, urinate into a cup. But that last request should prompt questions, at the least. The urine test is the first step into what’s sometimes called “the culture of culturing.”