Horizon Healthcare Innovations announced Wednesday the formation of an educational partnership with Duke University School of Nursing and Rutgers University College of Nursing for a new type of training for nurses. The 12-week course, which involves face-to-face and online sessions, trains nurses to become population-care coordinators, the cornerstone of patient-centered medical homes.
Rochester General Health System will be using only registered nurses in acute-care inpatient hospital settings and moving licensed practical nurses into other roles. The health system announced the plan Wednesday and said it affects about 40 LPNs at Rochester General Hospital and about five at Newark-Wayne Community Hospital. No LPNs are being laid off.
As striking workers circled outside Kaiser Permanente medical centers throughout Northern California on Tuesday, hospital and union leaders traded allegations about the motivations behind the bitter dispute. Much of the controversy centered around the striking nurses, who have a contract through 2014 but walked out in sympathy with mental health and optical workers who are negotiating a new contract. A hospital association ran a full-page newspaper advertisement claiming the nurses have no sympathy for patients and are only concerned about increasing their membership.
I didn't know much about the patient—just that he'd showed up on my floor the previous evening after some confusion about whether his room was ready. When I went into his room that morning, he was still asleep. I gently roused him while his doctor, who had followed me in, explained that he needed to do a physical exam. The patient, suddenly fully awake, challenged him: "Are you going to examine me or are you just going to stand there and talk about it?" His voice had an edge to it that, I'll reluctantly admit, scared me, especially when he quickly got up out of the bed and started yelling at the doctor and me.
Researchers at the University of Maryland's School of Nursing found that 55 percent of the 2,103 female nurses they surveyed were obese, citing job stress and the effect on sleep of long, irregular work hours as the cause. The study, which measured obesity using estimates of body mass index, found that nursing schedules affected not only the health of the nurses but the quality of patient care.
A crude new method of making methamphetamine poses a risk even to Americans who never get anywhere near the drug: It is filling hospitals with thousands of uninsured burn patients requiring millions of dollars in advanced treatment—a burden so costly that it's contributing to the closure of some burn units.