Middle Tennessee Medical Center in Murfreesboro has started notifying employees that less than 3 percent of its 1,200-member work force will face layoffs. Administrators are shrinking their work force to improve efficiency, but MTMC will adhere to national standards for operating a hospital efficiently, said a hospital spokesman.
About 350 doctors, patients and healthcare workers rallied in Chicago to press for increased funding for the Cook County (IL)Bureau of Health Services. Physicians told rallygoers that patients face increasingly long waits for appointments and that working conditions for health professionals have worsened. The rallygoers urged county commissioners to restore funding from cuts imposed during the 2007 budget crunch.
The 1.9-million-member Service Employees International trying to force nonprofit groups like hospitals to comply with standards of governing similar to those that federal law requires of private companies. In particular, the union argues that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston violated those standards by including its losses from bad debts in its tally of the charity care it provides.
Motivated by mounting medical costs, lawmakers and executives are urging doctors to embrace prescribing medications online. The move could save billions of dollars per year, and proponents say electronic prescriptions will make transactions more efficient, reduce medication errors and entice doctors to prescribe less expensive drugs.
Patients who go into cardiac arrest while in the hospital are more likely to die if it happens after 11 p.m., according to a study. The study didn't examine why days and overnights differed, but researchers found among the late night cases a higher portion of instances where patients were discovered with no heart electrical activity. Staff who are fatigued, less experienced or too few in number could also be a factor, researchers speculated.
Ambulance diversions have long served as crucial safety valves for busy emergency rooms in the Kansas City area. But as ER overcrowding reaches ever-higher levels, the tactic is becoming routine. Overall, Kansas City-area hospitals diverted ambulances an average of 6.25 percent of the time in 2007, a significant increase from 3.95 percent in 2004.
Faced with crowding in its adult unit and only limited use of its beds for children, Jefferson Memorial Hospital at Crystal City (MO) has closed its small pediatric unit. Jefferson Memorial has had a small pediatric unit since 1980, but the hospital's board decided that the need was greater for adult beds. The hospital recently has been running at or near its capacity of 170 adult beds.
Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins have taken root in Palm Beach County, FL, and are offering new options for top-rated care. But critics say their growing presence is pulling paying patients away from local hospitals. In response, officials at Cleveland Clinic say they're capturing patients that have been turned away by doctors switching to small concierge practices.
To help offset a shortage of primary care physicians, Ohio has a program that taps foreign-born medical grads to be PCPs in areas that need them. The program, however, is not meeting its stated goal and is instead helping big hospitals keep specialists on their staffs, according to a report.
Mary Lindsay-Barber, a beloved pediatrician at Indian Trail Pediatrics, owned and operated by the Carolinas HealthCare System, was fired from her job on February 1. Outraged, parents who took their children to Lindsay-Barber began a campaign of protest. They started a blog--www.supportmarybarber.blogspot.com--to notify other parents and urge them to request their medical records and leave the Indian Trail group, and posted a letter to Paul Franz, executive vice president of Carolinas HealthCare System. Officials at Carolinas HealthCare said they are prohibited by state law from discussing personnel decisions.
