A wave of vomiting and diarrhea has swept through wards at Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General hospitals and at a day-care facility run by Children's Hospital Boston. The norovirus outbreak left more than 70 patients and staff members ill. The caseshighlight the challenge of making sure that doctors, nurses, and other medical workers routinely and rigorously clean their hands to help avoid such outbreaks.
Almost half of all infections acquired at hospitals are in are linked to catheters, but a study has found that hospitals are doing very little to reduce the risks. The reportsays that even the most basic steps to make catheters safer are often not taken.
Once admired for its skill in treating a population afflicted by both social and physical ills, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta now faces the prospect of losing its accreditation. Although the hospital is unique in many ways, Grady is emblematic of the crippling effect America's healthcare crisis has had on public hospitals around the nation. Other hospitals have faced similar challenges in recent years, including those in Miami, Memphis and Chicago, experts say.
France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations. If the U.S. healthcare system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers.
Much of Maryland faces a doctor shortage that could become severe by 2015, according to a report from the Maryland State Medical Society and the Maryland Hospital Association. The trend could force patients to wait longer for appointments, search for specialists and turn more frequently to emergency rooms for help, the groups warned.
Seniors and the disabled using new Medicare drug cards fueled a 6.7 percent increase in health spending in 2006, according to a federal report. In most other areas of healthcare, there was a slowdown in spending, the report showed. While it still cost more to go to the hospital or doctor, the increase was not as great as in the previous year. The $2.1 trillion spent on healthcare in 2006 came to an average of $7,026 a person.
Although specific infection rates are not publicly reported in North Carolina, many Triangle health system hospitals say they have seen serious infections fall by at least half in recent years. The improvement has come from low-tech solutions such as improving hand washing before and after contact with patients, and from following proven infection control practices more consistently. The hospitals took a fresh look at infection control after the national Institute of Medicine published the landmark 1999 report, which found that up to 98,000 patients die each year because of preventable medical errors--including preventable infections.
Since 2003, hospital operating costs have increased less than the national average, according to a study done by actuarial and consulting company Milliman Inc. for the Greater Milwaukee Business Foundation on Health. Aurora Health Care showed the sharpest decline compared with other health care systems, with operating costs now in line with the market average. The study also found that operating costs for area hospitals increased about 10 percent from 2003 through 2006--roughly 4 to 5 percentage points below the national average. A 2005 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the Milwaukee area had the fifth-highest hospital costs in the country.
Florida's Lake Nona "medical city" project is finally breaking groung as construction begins on the University of Central Florida's College of Medicine and its Burnett College of Biomedical Sciences, as well as the Burnham Institute for Medical Research. All three facilities are scheduled to open in the latter half of 2009. UCF hopes to eventually add a school of nursing at the site in southeastern Orlando, though that would be years down the road. Also planned is a cancer-research institute that will likely be run jointly by M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando and UCF, and a long-awaited VA hospital, but construction on the latter facility won't begin until 2009 at the earliest, with an expected opening date of 2012.
Accountants cannot find records to support $469,365 spent over four years by the Jefferson (AL) Metropolitan Health Care Authority, created by Larry Langford, then commission president and now Birmingham's mayor, established to oversee all county health operations and assets, including Cooper Green Mercy Hospital. The missing documentation included paperwork supporting payments to a consultant who now is Mayor Langford's chief of operations, a Birmingham lawyer, the IRS, and the U.S. Treasury.