Four public hospitals in flood-prone parts of New York City are getting at least $1.6 billion in federal money to protect them from the kind of damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy, officials announced Thursday. Money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency will create a new, storm-resilient building to house the emergency room and such key equipment as X-ray machines at Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn, where the storm inundated the basement and came into the first floor in 2012. The water plunged the hospital into darkness and sent staff members scrambling to move patients on stretchers to higher floors before ultimately evacuating.
Maryland doctors would be fingerprinted and continually monitored for criminal charges under draft legislation the state Board of Physicians plans to propose next year. The policy would require them to apply for a background check when first seeking a medical license, or for currently practicing doctors, when they next renew their licenses. Background checks would occur once for each doctor. The board plans to use an FBI program that allows indefinite monitoring that would alert regulators to any new criminal activity. But the proposed legislation does not prescribe circumstances under which the board would deny or revoke a license, instead giving officials flexibility to consider the severity of the crime, the applicant's age when it was committed, how much time has passed, and what he or she has been doing since.
Steward Health Care System announced today that it will be closing Quincy Medical Center by the end of the year. Steward plans to replace the financially struggling 196-bed hospital with an outpatient urgent care center. "While Quincy Medical Center earns top quality and safety ratings, competition from Boston-area medical centers, significant cuts to Medicare reimbursements, continued Medicaid underfunding, continued rate disparity, and precipitously declining inpatient volume have made QMC unsustainable," Dr. Mark Girard, president of Steward Hospitals, a for-profit company, said in a statement. "On an average day, only one fifth of all beds are occupied and it has become abundantly clear that local residents no longer seek inpatient services from Quincy Medical Center."
Nurses at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento will be protected head-to-toe and are prepared to handle the Ebola virus if it shows up at their doors, they said at a media briefing Thursday. The most recent protocols for what is called the "donning and doffing" of protective equipment, released earlier this week, detail an intricate and painstaking 42-step process for putting on and taking off the gear. The protocols are intended to minimize transmission of the Ebola virus, which spreads through bodily fluids, but not air, and can be killed with basic sanitizing materials.
Three remarkable San Francisco nonprofit hospitals — Kaiser San Francisco, St. Mary's Medical Center and California Pacific Medical Center — are the latest targets of a recycled political attack by the Greenlining Institute; an attack that's not only wrongheaded, it's been discussed, discredited and rejected by the Legislature for two years running. The truth is, these hospitals make meaningful contributions that improve community health and provide care for the underserved and uninsured. Greenlining's goal, in league with their political ally, the California Nurses Association, is to question if these hospitals deserve their tax-exempt status in exchange for the community benefits that they provide.
President Obama said Wednesday that there are lines he "can't cross" as Republicans again set out to dismantle his signature healthcare law. "There are certainly some lines I'm going to draw," he said in his first remarks since the midterm elections, in which every Republican winner opposed the law. "Repeal of the law, I won't sign," he said. While he said he would be open to "responsible changes" to the law, he did not provide examples of changes he would support and said he was waiting to hear the priorities of the new Congress.