America is changing—it's getting grayer, fatter, and more medicated. But luckily, it's also getting a lot more insured. A few days ago, the Obama administration announced that eight million people signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, but that's just the beginning. Partly as a result of the ACA's expansion of Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, Medicaid enrollment is projected to grow by 11 or 12 million each year until 2024. So who is going to treat these people? There's no way to know how doctors will respond to the surge in demand. Some pundits are predicting bread lines for biopsies, particularly in areas that already face a shortage of doctors.
Summa Health System is eliminating premium pay for about 230 nurses who work weekend shifts at Akron City, St. Thomas, Barberton and Wadsworth-Rittman hospitals. The nurses recently were notified that they will no longer receive bonus pay for working weekends beginning June 29, Summa spokesman Mike Bernstein said Monday. "Based on current compensation models at similar organizations in our market, we have adjusted our nursing compensation as related to premium pay for weekend hours worked," Bernstein said. "No changes have been made to anyone's base pay. … We did not announce a reduction in hours for the nurses in question, and we did not make any changes to care at the bedside."
Healthcare workers are more likely to wash their hands if patients are asked to monitor them, according to a new study. It details an 11-month pilot project at the Family Practice Health Center at Women's College Hospital in Toronto. Patients were asked to observe and record the hand hygiene habits of their healthcare providers, who were aware that they were being watched. Nearly 97 percent of the healthcare workers washed their hands before direct contact with their patients, according to the study published in the April issue of the American Journal of Infection Control.
At most hospitals, nurses are still required to communicate with colleagues and doctors via Voice over IP (VoIP) or pagers. But many nurses, who tend to be constantly on the go, are increasingly ignoring policy and are texting from their smartphones instead. This approach carries risks: Not only are the phones insecure, but they could also introduce germs into sterile environments. Pagers may be less risky, but they aren't efficient. They cost US hospitals $8.3 billion in 2013, according to a report by the Ponemon Institute: $3.2 billion through time-consuming discharge processes and another $5.1 billion while clinicians waited for patient information.
Nurses laid off when the North Adams Regional Hospital closed abruptly two weeks ago picketed outside federal bankruptcy court in Springfield on Monday. A separate hearing in state court that had been set for Tuesday has been postponed. Inside the federal courthouse on State Street, the bankruptcy court held a status conference in the bankruptcy case filed Thursday by North Adams Regional Hospital's parent organization, Northern Berkshire Healthcare. Northern Berkshire filed for Chapter 7 liquidation Thursday. The hospital closed March 28.
Nurse practitioners in New York will be able to operate more independently of doctors under a bill slated to become law as part of the state budget enacted this week. The Nurse Practitioners Modernization Act will remove the requirement of a written practice agreement between an experienced nurse practitioner and a doctor as a condition of practice. The law will take effect Jan. 1, 2015. Seventeen other states and Washington, D.C., have already done this. The state Medical Society and doctors groups at the federal level have adamantly opposed efforts to give nurse practitioners more independence.