Nurses at Marion County's privately run jail were forced to escort dangerous inmates, faced retaliation when they reported co-workers' errors and were sidelined because they are black, according to a recently filed lawsuit. The suit alleges mismanagement and mishandling of inmates' medications at Marion County Jail II. Five of the six plaintiffs have quit their jobs, and the suit says supervisors all but forced them out through "a deliberate and successful campaign to rid Jail II of African-American nurses."
Aurora Health Care has dropped its bid to persuade SynergyHealth, the parent of St. Joseph's Hospital near West Bend, to join the Aurora system. The decision comes two days before SynergyHealth's board is scheduled to decide among competing offers from Aurora and two other health care systems. Columbia St. Mary's and Froedtert & Community Health, which plan to combine their operations in a partnership, and Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare also hope to align with SynergyHealth.
A new study has shown that doctors and nurses that often skip soap and water in favor of an alcohol-based hand gel, had no bearing on the rate of infections among patients. The doctor who studied the problem pointed to many villains: Rings and fingernails that are too long and hard to clean, poor handling of catheters and treatment areas that aren't sanitized. The study appears in the January issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.
Substandard care at a southern Illinois Veterans Affairs hospital may have contributed to 19 deaths over the past two years. The hospital in Marion, IL, initially drew scrutiny over deaths connected to a single surgeon, but two federal reports found fault with five other doctors. The hospital undertook many surgeries that its staffing or lack of proper surgical expertise made it ill-equipped to handle, and hospital administrators were too slow to respond once problems surfaced.
A new poll has found that 77 percent of small business owners do not offer health insurance to their employees. Discover Business Card's survey also found that 39 percent of small business owners said the cost of healthcare has a major impact on their ability to grow. In addition, more than half of respondents said obtaining affordable health insurance for employees was very difficult.
Five nonprofit hospitals in San Francisco's received $79 million in tax breaks intended to compensate them for providing free care to the city's poor and uninsured in 2007, but they spent just $16 million on charity care, according to a report. California Pacific Medical Center was responsible for the vast majority of the disparity, the report showed. California Pacific received close to $70 million in tax breaks, while spending $5.2 million on charity care.
The approval of an agreement to reinvent the management structure of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta has been overshadowed by confirmation that county commissions could scuttle the deal. Fulton and DeKalb must approve the plan because the Georgia counties have bond agreements with Grady, said Lewis Horne, an attorney hired by Grady to help craft the lease.
"Friday Night at the ER" is a decision-making game developed by a consultant from Johns Hopkins University designed to help hospital departments to work together more efficiently. Four-player teams try to juggle a limited number of hospital beds, a relentless influx of patients and a gradual attrition of nurses to care for them. The decisions come while racing against a clock that forces faster and faster decisions, and every so often game cards announce another mini-crisis to ramp up the pressure.
A $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will be used over two years to connect Evansville with the nonprofit Indiana Health Information Exchange, officials have announced. The exchange consists of 33 hospitals, 7,200 physicians and 2,445 practices in Indiana, and can deliver lab results, reports, medication histories, treatment histories and more in a standard, electronic format.
U.S. medical schools are increasingly plugging geriatric courses into their curricula and adding specially trained faculty members as they respond to an imminent boom in the number of older Americans and the need to better understand how to properly care for the elderly. Out of 800,000 doctors in the United States, roughly 7,000 are geriatricians. The country needs another 13,000 to adequately care for today's older population, according to the American Geriatrics Society, and the shortfall could reach 36,000 by 2030.
