The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a payment of nearly $3 million to the family of a woman who was found dead in a stairwell 17 days after she disappeared from her hospital room. A building engineer checking the locked stairwell at San Francisco General Hospital found Lynne Spalding's body in October 2013. The 57-year-old woman was being treated for a bladder infection and was described as disoriented when she left her room. The city will pay $2.94 million and the University of California will pay $59,000. UC was named in the family's legal claim over Spalding's death because its doctors and nurses were involved in her care and monitoring.
Guess what well-known health-oriented foundation is giving a $25 million matching gift to help build Austin's new teaching hospital? That's right. The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation's pledge to match private donations to the Seton Healthcare Family's new hospital, dollar for dollar, puts fund raising "way ahead of schedule," Seton's President and CEO Jesús Garza said Tuesday. The hospital will be called the Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas when it opens in 2017 as the main place for training new doctors and medical students at the UT Dell Medical School. "With the Dell Medical School being built right now, we felt like this was a great next step," Susan Dell, co-founder and chairwoman of the foundation board, said at a news conference.
The measles outbreak that began at California's Disneyland Resort last month is part of a new trend that worries public health officials. Large outbreaks in the U.S. of the highly infectious disease have become more common in the past two years, even though measles hasn't been indigenous since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, persuading skeptical parents to vaccinate their children has grown more difficult because concerns about a possible link between vaccines and autism—now debunked by science—have expanded to more general, and equally groundless, worries about the effects of multiple shots on a child's immune system, vaccine experts and doctors say. [Subscription Required]
As he took me through an interactive map on his computer screen, Oakland physician Nate Gross showed me what a neurosurgeon in my area might expect to make. Scrolling his cursor over the D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland, a number appeared: $580,000. I knew that, vaguely, but I did gasp. "But if you move down to South Carolina," Gross continued, scrolling south, "here, you're looking at $645,000." In an even more drastic example, the average anesthesiologist practicing in Massachusetts would increase her salary by 61 percent if she moved to Wisconsin.
The announcement by the Obama Administration that it will start tying most of its Medicare reimbursement to quality or value rather than volume has garnered a lot of positive responses -- but not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.
The anesthesiologist was getting nervous. Joan Rivers, the comic known for her sassy wit and raspy voice, had been complaining of more than the usual hoarseness. Now Ms. Rivers was on the operating table at an Upper East Side clinic and her private doctor, Gwen Korovin, wanted to send a small instrument into her windpipe to take a second look at her vocal cords, according to a malpractice lawsuit filed Monday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The anesthesiologist warned that the cords were extremely swollen, and that they could seize up and Ms. Rivers would not be able to breathe.