Leaning into friendlier political terrain, a union for Minnesota nurses renewed its call Wednesday for state lawmakers to establish requirements that would dictate how hospitals staff their emergency rooms, childbirth wards and other units. The drive to impose minimum staffing levels in law has the union and hospitals bracing for a contentious fight, one that could also expose simmering divides between nurses who are represented by the Minnesota Nurses Association and those who are not. Minnesota would join California as the only states with such a law if new Democratic majorities and Gov. Mark Dayton go along.
Virtually all of the 15,000 employees of Baptist Health South Florida are getting a $1,000 St. Valentine's Day gift to make up for losses in take-home pay caused by increased taxes, the hospital system announced Tuesday. The initiative, which will cost the system $12 million, will benefit everyone except executives—assistant vice president and above—and Baptist-employed physicians.
Unlike patients who have a choice about getting the flu shot, many health care workers didn't have a say this year. For the first time in Rhode Island, hospital and nursing home workers were told to roll up their sleeves, and hundreds of hospitals in other states have similar policies. "No one likes to be coerced, and there were some people who objected," says Virginia Burke, CEO of the Rhode Island Health Care Association, which provides skilled nurses and rehabilitation workers to the state's nursing homes. "My fear when the mandate came out was we'd lose workforce. To my delight, that hasn't happened." But more than 1,000 workers filed a petition to oppose the directive.
Crises in the operating room are common, but caregivers often fail to save the patient because they do not recall the necessary steps quickly enough. An experiment at Brigham and Women's Hospital suggests that surgeons, nurses, and other staff can vastly improve their handling of these critical situations by reviewing checklists, an approach used by pilots during airplane mishaps. When checklists were available to surgical teams, they missed just 6 percent of live-saving steps, compared with 23 percent when the tool was not available, according to results published online Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Patients can refuse a flu shot. Should doctors and nurses have that right, too? That is the thorny question surfacing as U.S. hospitals increasingly crack down on employees who won't get flu shots, with some workers losing their jobs over their refusal. "Where does it say that I am no longer a patient if I'm a nurse," wondered Carrie Calhoun, a longtime critical care nurse in suburban Chicago who was fired last month after she refused a flu shot.
A nurse who refused to wear a surgical mask after receiving an exemption from a mandatory flu vaccination was fired for violating her hospital's policy. Carla Brock, a board-certified holistic nurse who has worked 11 years at Cox South Hospital here, said she is speaking out because she believes her hospital's new requirement to wear a mask if a staffer opts out of the flu vaccine amounts to a scarlet letter. CoxHealth, which owns four hospitals in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas, says it simply is putting the patient first.