Thomas F. Zenty III, CEO of University Hospitals, has announced a new leadership structure that includes the addition of two key new members and two new positions for current UH leadership. Senior leadership will now be organized into three areas: clinical operations, system administrative services, and system staff functions. Leading UH clinical operations is COO Achilles Demetriou, MD. The new System CMO Eric Bieber, MD, joined the health system Jan. 1, and comes from Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA. Zenty will lead System Staff functions and have direct leadership of the hospital's strategic planning, financial development, legal affairs, institutional relations and development, diversity initiatives, hospital/physician compliance, and human resources.
Shore Memorial Hospital COO Ron Johnson will succeed current President/CEO Albert L. Gutierrez at the end of 2011. The announcement caps an 11-month search for a successor. For the interim, Johnson has been promoted to executive vice president, and the two executives have worked through a detailed plan that will transfer roles and responsibilities from Gutierrez to Johnson. Gutierrez was appointed CEO at Shore Memorial in 2002.
National Public Radio, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, offered a job growth Top 10 list for the next decade. Four of the Top 10 job growth areas are in healthcare: No. 1 on the list is registered nurses. No. 2 is home health aides. No. 5 is personal and home care aides. No. 9 is nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants.
Market research firm Borrell Associates says the healthcare industry, which topped the list in 2009 with more than 500,000 job openings, is expected to continue to hold first place in 2010 as well, with job openings expected to exceed 600,000.
OSHA recently solidified leadership for the agency and has provided a clearer picture of the regulatory horizon.
First of all, David Michaels, PhD, MPH, assumed his position as head of OSHA when the Senate confirmed his nomination as assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health. Nominated by President Barack Obama on June 28, the Senate acted on the nomination December 3.
Michaels, an epidemiologist, has been a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington, DC, and is also the author of Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.
Agency watchers assumed that any work on new, and perhaps controversial, standards, would await the establishment of a permanent director.
While Michaels as settling in, Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis held an online Q&A session Dec. 7 to discuss regulations at the Department of Labor.
Solis announced that OSHA is considering airborne infectious disease protection for healthcare workers and will publish a request for information in the Federal Register in March.
A standard would require healthcare employers to protect workers from tuberculosis, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and influenza, such as H1N1, on which OSHA recently issued an enforcement directive.
When asked if an airborne infectious disease standard would be modeled after the California version, which took years to achieve consensus among employers, labor and other stakeholders, Solis said the California standard "would certainly be one important piece of information that OSHA will consider in deciding whether to propose or issue a standard." She would not predict how long it would take to issue a final standard.
Also, Solis confirmed that although OSHA has conducted several inspections, it has not yet issued any citations based on the H1N1 enforcement directive.
In an OSHA-specific session later that day, HealthLeaders Media asked OSHA interim director Jordan Barab, if the absence of airborne infectious disease standard has hampered the agency with regard to its H1N1 educational preparedness and enforcement activities?
"No, it has not hampered us," said Barab. "While a standard on airborne transmissible diseases would have been preferable, we believe that we are responding to the issues effectively using existing standards and the General Duty Clause."
On the matter of issuing an industry-wide ergonomics standard, both Solis and Barab reiterated—word-for-word in fact—"At this time, OSHA has no plans for regulatory activity." Both said that a proposal to reinstate the work-related musculoskeletal disorders column on the OSHA 300 Injury Log was not a prelude to issuing such a standard.
Concerning an industry-specific ergonomic standard, such as one for safe patient handling standard, Barab said," There are many options that OSHA might consider if the agency decides to pursue rulemaking in this area. Industry specific standards is one option that would be considered."
David LaHoda, the managing editor ofMedical Environment Updateand OSHA Watch, has produced healthcare training videos and consulted for medical practices and ambulatory healthcare facilities.
A small contingent of legal scholars and many Republican lawmakers argue that the health reform measures passed by both chambers are unconstitutional and will be ruled so by the Supreme Court. Their primary target is the the individual mandate, which requires people to get health insurance or pay a financial penalty of at least 2% of their income to the government. The mandate is a central component of Democrats' reform plans, which operate under the assumption that bringing everyone into the national insurance pool will reduce premiums across the board, the Washington Post reports.