Hospitals across New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut all report struggling with the costs of delivering emergency care and sometimes more to illegal immigrants and other uninsured patients, and many see it as their obligation. The Connecticut Hospital Association, for example, estimated its 29 hospitals spent $93.3 million in 2006 compared with $78 million four years before on uncompensated care, although officials did not attribute the huge increase to illegal immigrants. Medicaid permits coverage for illegal immigrants for emergency care but virtually no other services, and advocates say there is still a major void in quality healthcare for low income patients.
California regulators have announced emergency measures to investigate the criminal backgrounds of all registered nurses in the state. Effective immediately, the state nursing board will ask all nurses renewing their licenses whether they have been convicted of any crimes in recent years, said Carrie Lopez, director of the California Department of Consumer Affairs. The Board of Registered Nursing must also develop emergency regulations to obtain fingerprints from all nurses licensed before 1990.
In this opinion piece for the Chicago Tribune, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, says the recent economic upheaval makes healthcare reform more pressing, and makes comprehensive reform—change in the way healthcare is paid for and how care is organized and delivered—more realistic and feasible. Emanuel is chair of the department of bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health.
In North Carolina, a novel approach called Community Care may have found a cure to Medicaid bleeding money. One way Community Care saves money is by keeping up with Medicaid patients who have chronic diseases such as diabetes and asthma. By making sure patients are receiving medicines and other treatment, the program cuts down on costly emergency room visits and unnecessary hospital stays.
The Rhode Island Health Department has reprimanded Providence-based Miriam Hospital, after identifying a confluence of missteps that led a surgical team to operate on the wrong knee of a patient undergoing elective surgery. The staff failed to look for the surgeon's mark on the patient's skin, the "yes" that indicated which side needed surgery. But there were other problems as well, including marking surgical sites with ink that sometimes rubs off and failing to verify the surgical site against the original source of information.
BayCare, Tampa Bay, FL's largest hospital group, has biometric information that can be used to identify patients every time they step into a BayCare facility. Those include the hospitals of Morton Plant Mease, St. Joseph's, St. Anthony’s, and the Bardmoor Outpatient & Surgery Center in Largo. BayCare is among the first healthcare providers stepping into biometrics—technology that is spreading everywhere, from airport security to Walt Disney World.
Despite the state's steadily rising population over the past two and a half years, the number of Georgia children covered by public insurance programs has dropped by more than 100,000. Pediatricians and children's health advocates say administrative and other roadblocks prevent coverage for thousands of children who are eligible by family income for Medicaid and PeachCare, an insurance program for children of parents whose incomes are slightly above those on Medicaid.
A Pennsylvania bill, which took seven years to pass, ensures that nurses and other caregivers will not be forced to work double shifts, a common practice at hospitals and other facilities that can be dangerous for nurses and patients alike. According to a 2004 University of Pennsylvania study, the risk of medical error was as much as three times higher when a nurse worked a shift of 12 1/2 hours or longer. In 2005, a report published by the Pennsylvania Department of Health showed that 13.6% of the state's registered nurses had experienced mandatory overtime in the two weeks prior to taking the department's survey.
Cancer specialists and surgeons rarely respond with empathy to patients' concerns, suggests a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Researchers assessed transcripts of 20 audio recordings of consultations between men with lung cancer and surgeons or oncologists at a Veterans Affairs hospital. Physicians had 384 opportunities to show empathy to patient comments such as "This is overwhelming" and "I'm fighting it." They missed all but 39 (10%) of the 384 chances.
When confronted with patients who are stressed out and showing signs of heart problems, family physicians and internists are more likely to chalk up the symptoms to anxiety if the sufferer is female, according to a study. When the patients didn't complain of a specific and recent source of stress in their lives, there was no difference in the way men and women were diagnosed for heart disease or referred to a cardiologist. The findings were presented at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics meeting in Washington, DC.
