John Muir Health has agreed to pay $340,000 to seven nurses and a lab technician who were denied jobs at the health care provider's Walnut Creek hospital because they were allergic to latex.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced the settlement on Wednesday, a day after it was approved by an Oakland judge.
The EEOC says John Muir Health discriminated against the eight women on the basis of a perceived disability—an allergy to latex—when it withdrew their job offers in 2003 and 2004.
The commission says John Muir should have provided the women with widely available substitutes for gloves and hospital equipment that contain latex.
Hospitals have long vied for the greatest clinical reputation, and recent efforts to increase public accountability by publishing hospital results have added a statistical dimension to this battle of the health care titans. Information from most hospitals on mortality rates, readmissions and patient satisfaction is readily available on the Internet. A quick click of the green “compare” button on the “Hospital Compare” Web site operated by the Department of Health and Human Services gives any potential patient, or competitor, side-by-side lists of statistics from rival institutions that leaves little to the imagination.
The upside of such transparency is that hospitals all over the country are eager to improve their patient outcomes. The downside is that no one really knows how.
A University of Iowa hospital supervisor abruptly left employment Thursday as the school announced it had disciplined two employees over a plan to use a baby monitor to listen to subordinates' conversations.
Pamela Snider, an office coordinator in the Department of Urology, no longer works for the university, UI Vice President for Strategic Communication Tysen Kendig said. He would not say whether she was one of the two employees disciplined in the case, saying those were confidential personnel matters.
St. Cloud Hospital officials have suspended a nurse suspected of giving 23 patients bacterial infections while stealing their pain medication.
Most of the patients were hospitalized in one unit from last October through early March. Hospital officials aren't sure if more people were infected and are asking any former patients who contracted an infection after they left the hospital to contact them.
The nurse was suspended last week after hospital, state and federal officials noticed a number of similar infections and began looking for a cause.
Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) has launched the nation's first personalized cancer decision-support Web site that will collect and distribute information about the expanding list of genetic mutations that impact different cancers, as well as provide links to research documents on various treatment options based on specific mutations.
The online tool, My Cancer Genome, is linked to Vanderbilt University Medical Center's StarPanel electronic medical record (EMR) database, giving physicians the ability to cross-reference patients' medical histories, lab results, medications, and other medical information with online data that tracks the latest developments in personalized cancer medicine and clinical research.
Researchers continue to use open-source PC drivers for Microsoft's Kinect 3D camera controller to adapt the hardware for new purposes, with one Toronto hospital now using the device to help surgeons manipulate medical images during surgery without the need for time-wasting clean-up.
Surgeons often have to leave the sterile environment around a patient to pull up necessary medical scan images on a computer, a process that can require up to 20 minutes of clean up each time before the surgeon can return to the operation.