A recent study reports that specialists are increasingly providing routine follow-up and preventive care that would be better suited to the primary care setting. Researchers looked at more than 1 billion ambulatory visits to U.S. office-based specialists in 2002-04 and found that 46.3% of visits were for routine follow-up and preventive care of patients already known to the specialist, while referrals accounted for only 30.4% of all visits. "The results of our study suggest now that not all activity performed by specialists when in a specialist role may require specialized care," the authors commented.
Democratic lawmakers filed a bill that would require health insurers to provide coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. Sen. Jay Rockefeller said the legislation would help the 133 million Americans with at least one chronic illness. Supporters of the bill hope the language is part of a larger healthcare reform effort.
Moving against the tide of many other bosses across the country, the top executive at Joliet, IL-based Silver Cross Hospital is pledging no layoffs through 2009. In an internal memo last week to employees, Paul Pawlak, Silver Cross' president and chief executive, said the pledge will apply to all full- and part-time employees. It will not apply to executive staff or temporary employees, nor to workers facing "disciplinary actions." The hospital has more than 1,500 employees.
Employees at Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are mostly praising the chief executive's proposals for slashing the number of potential layoffs from more than 600 to about 150 through a combination of wage freezes, salary cuts in high administrative jobs, and benefit reductions. The chief executive, Paul Levy, has held meetings with employees to find ways to spare the lowest-wage earners from the budget ax he needs to wield as revenues fall short by $20 million.
Two of the nation's fastest-growing labor unions—the Service Employees International Union and the California Nurses Association—have ended a bitter dispute by agreeing to work together to unionize hospital workers and push for universal health coverage. Andrew Stern, the service employees' president, said that at a moment when there is an unusual opportunity to push for a better healthcare system and a law that would make it easier to unionize workers, "we believe that our unions, together, can do far more in terms of accomplishing these goals than either of us can do on our own."
Just a few months after its opening, a nonprofit Wise County, TX, hospital is laying off employees and running into money troubles. Doctors' Hospital, which opened in September 2008 in Bridgeport, has drawn down $3.9 million from its available $6 million credit lines, according to a financial disclosure. Hospital officials also slashed 17% of the work force March 9.