If you have ever had a loved one in a hospital intensive care unit, you know. In that sterile scary room, the nurse can be the most important person. She or he is a steady presence — deftly monitoring the mountain of tubes and beeping machines, while at the same time calming frightened families and friends. I can remember what it was like being in that emotional and physical space. It’s a scene still emblazoned in my memory — my family and I standing at the draped hospital bed praying out loud that my dad would be okay.
First-day jitters come with any new job but when the work involves pushing needles into strangers' bellies, stitching up gaping wounds or even delivering babies, that debut can be especially nerve-wracking -- for everyone involved. Brand-new doctors often launch right into patient care within weeks of graduating from medical school. To make sure their skills are up to snuff, many medical schools and hospitals run crash courses in the basics for these new interns. It's called boot camp at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and its adjoining Feinberg medical school, a program involving two to three days of intense practice before letting the newbies loose on patients.
The number of licensed nurses in Oklahoma stands at nearly 75,000, an all-time high in the state. The Oklahoman reported Sunday that a recent open records request to the Oklahoma Board of Nursing found there are 74,656 licensed nurses in the state, an increase of more than 22,000 during the past decade. Nursing board executive director Kim Glazier said she traces the increase to a panic of sorts that began in 2004 or 2005 when reports began that there was a looming nursing shortage to take care of the aging baby boom generation, generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964. Efforts were made then to attract more people to nursing.
Saying the elderly can be abused anywhere, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled June 30 that hospitals can be sued under special laws designed to protect vulnerable adults. In a unanimous decision, the justices rejected arguments by attorneys for hospitals that the law was always intended solely to cover only things like nursing homes and similar facilities. Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch said there is nothing in the wording of the statute to support that claim. More to the point, Berch said that adopting the view of the hospitals "would thwart the Legislature's goal of protecting vulnerable adults" in adopting the Adult Protective Services Act in 1989.
The path to owning your own medical practice typically runs through more than a decade of schooling, grinding through medical school, residency and years of specialty training. Unless you're Rick Crews. "I knew next to nothing about health care," says the proud owner of four urgent care clinics in Massachusetts. The former UBS financial advisor isn't a board-certified physician–he's a franchisee, one of hundreds who, along with some of the biggest private equity and venture capital firms, are betting that they can use the retail lessons of McDonald's MCD to turn the health care world upside down.
In retrospect, it looks as if Massachusetts made a serious mistake in 1994 when it let its two most prestigious (and costly) hospitals — Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital, both affiliated with Harvard — merge into a single system known as Partners HealthCare. Investigations by the state attorney general's office have documented that the merger gave the hospitals enormous market leverage to drive up health care costs in the Boston area by demanding high reimbursements from insurers that were unrelated to the quality or complexity of care delivered.