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.
The former senior vice president of City of Angels Medical Center pleaded guilty today to paying illegal kickbacks to recruiters who referred homeless patients from skid row to the hospital, where they received unnecessary health services. Dante Nicholson, 51, was the third person convicted in a widespread scheme to pay illegal kickbacks and defraud Medicare and Medi-Cal by recruiting homeless people from the skid row area in downtown Los Angeles.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health has awarded the the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine a $4.7 million, four-year grant to study the spread and control of hospital-acquired infections. Lee Harrison, MD, the principal investigator of the grant and a university professor of medicine and epidemiology, said research will focus on C. difficile, A. baumannii, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, all of which are infections commonly spread in hospital settings.
Hospital operator Tenet Healthcare Corp. has announced it is merging Florida Medical Center and North Shore Medical Center.
The merger will take effect June 1. Florida Medical Center is located in Fort Lauderdale, FL; and North Shore Medical Center is in Miami. Dallas-based Tenet said both hospitals will stay open throughout the transition and will carry on as business as usual.
With its modern chandeliers, floors that look like wood, picture windows and earth tone decor, a new facility in Florida hardly looks like what it actually is—a hospital. "We were trying to stay away from an institutional look," said Catherine Edmisten, director of clinical services for the 50-bed hospital, formally named Long Term Acute Care Hospital at Connerton.
In response to the struggling economy, some South Florida doctors are lowering their prices for their uninsured patients or giving them other help if they can't afford to pay. Tony Prieto, president of the Broward County Medical Association, said in a statement: "Patients need to understand that doctors have bills to pay, staff salaries, and office expenses, but we are compassionate, reasonable people who want to help our patients."
A Colorado House committee has approved a bill that could set the stage for a single-payer healthcare system, potentially leading to a major change in the way state residents get and pay for medical care. The bill would establish a healthcare authority with a 23-member board of directors to create a system in Colorado that would be the administrator and payer for healthcare services.
