The healthcare sector has again provided about the only bright spot in an otherwise drab report on job growth in August from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Healthcare employment rose by 29,700 jobs in August, and the sector has created 205,100 new jobs in the first eight months of 2011, accounting for 22% of the 930,000 non-farm payroll additions in the overall economy in 2011, BLS preliminary data show.
A further breakdown of BLS preliminary data show that within the healthcare sector, hospitals gained 7,700 new jobs in August, after recording 11,000 new jobs in July. Hospitals lost 1,900 jobs in June, but have created 52,600 new jobs so far in 2011. By comparison, in the first eight months of 2010, hospitals created 15,800 new jobs, BLS data and preliminary data show.
Ambulatory services created 18,100 new jobs in August, and have been responsible for 58% (119,600) of new jobs in healthcare so far in 2011. Ambulatory services created 110,900 new jobs in the first eight months of 2010, BLS data and preliminary data show.
Physicians' offices reported 5,600 payroll additions in August and 30,600 new jobs so far in 2011. Physicians' offices created 39,600 new jobs in the first eight months of 2010, BLS data and preliminary data show.
BLS data from July and August are preliminary and may be considerably revised in the coming months.
Nearly 14.1 million people worked in the healthcare sector in August, with more than 4.7 million jobs at hospitals, more than 6.1 million jobs in ambulatory services, and more than 2.3 million jobs in physicians' offices, BLS preliminary data show.
Beyond the healthcare sector, nonfarm job growth in the larger U.S. economy was flat in August. The stagnant job market was blamed largely on a two-week strike affecting about 45,000 telecommunications workers at Verizon who were taken off the payroll in August. Those workers are now back the job.
The nation's unemployment rate remained essentially unchanged at 9.1%, where it has been since April, with 14 million people unemployed.
The number of long-term unemployed—people jobless for 27 weeks or longer—was 6 million in August, and represented 42.9% of the unemployed, BLS preliminary data show.
Online advertised vacancies for healthcare practitioners and technical occupations increased by 26,300 in August, breaking two consecutive months of declines, The Conference Board reported.
Among the top 10 occupation groups in the overall economy with the largest number of online advertised vacancies, healthcare practitioners and technical occupations posted the only increases in August.
The highly skilled health occupations posted 513,700 online job ads for the month and made up some ground lost from July's decrease of 61,200 postings. However, demand for healthcare practitioners and technicians dropped by 98,800 job postings since January, according to The Conference Board Help Wanted Onlinereport.
The board's Help Wanted Online Data Series tracks more than 1,000 online job boards across the United States.
August job posting gains were reported for registered nurses, speech-language pathologists, licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses, family and general practitioners, and occupational therapists. For those occupations, there were more than two jobs available for every job seeker, with an average hourly wage of $34.27.
Healthcare support positions fell by 500 listings to 116,000 in August. There were 2.6 healthcare support job seekers for every job opening, and the positions paid – on average -- $12.94 an hour, The Conference Board reported.
In the overall economy, on line job listings fell by 163,000 listings in August, to 3.9 million. The August decline follows a drop of 217,000 job listings in July and 100,000 job listings in June. There were more than three unemployed people for every online advertised vacancy in July, the latest monthly data available for unemployment.
"Following a very strong first quarter (+763,000), labor demand has fallen off in the second quarter and into the third quarter (-456,000), reducing the earlier gains," June Shelp, Vice President at The Conference Board, said in a media release.
Overall, 2011 has seen a 308,000 increase in labor demand, but the average monthly gain this year (+38,000) is less than last year's average monthly gain at this point (+62,000), Shelp said.
More than 10,000 nurses from coast to coast are planning to attend demonstrations Thursday at the district offices of members of Congress in 21 states, urging them to support a tax on financial transactions.
The nurses, members of National Nurses United, want Congress to impose a 0.5% levy on financial transactions involving stocks, bonds, currency trading and derivatives. The nurses say the tax is already in place in more than 40 countries, and could raise up to $350 billion a year in the U.S. to rebuild the infrastructure.
"Congress is willing to bail out Wall Street because they get political contributions but they aren't willing to take care of Main Street. We are taking care of Main Street every single day so we felt it was our job to step up," NNU Co-president Deborah Burger, RN, told HealthLeaders Media.
"Nurses are doing this because they are sick and tired of seeing patients coming into the hospitals and community clinics who can't afford healthcare, who have lost their home and jobs, and who can't afford the drugs to take care of themselves and their families," Burger says.
"If they're asking everybody for shared sacrifice it is time for Wall Street to step up to the plate. We aren't asking for a lot. We are asking for a tiny transaction tax to rebuild Main Street."
In addition to the district rallies, the nurses are holding other events such as soup kitchens for the hungry, community forums, and street theater skits in Boston – where a town crier in will read a litany of complaints against Wall Street malfeasance – and in Chicago, San Francisco, and Orlando, and smaller cities, such as Corpus Christi, TX, Marquette, MI, and Dayton, OH.
While unions generally rely on a more sympathetic reception from Democrats, Burger says NNU will press both parties to support the transaction tax because NNU does not believe it is a partisan issue. "We are pressuring Republicans and Democrats. We are not out there fronting for the Democratic Party," she says. "We are holding both sides accountable because both sides have been pandering to Wall Street and have bailed them out with trillions of dollars."
"We want to make sure that everybody understands that you aren't off the hook just because you're a Democrat or a Republican. We are targeting the entire system, because the entire system is morally bankrupt."
Burger says NNU will release data contrasting contributions Democratic and Republican lawmakers have received from Wall Street even as the lawmakers' districts suffer from economic woes.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), for example, allegedly has accepted $2,417,672 in campaign contributions from Wall Street financial institutions over the past 12 years. In the meantime, NNU says 69,241 people in Ryan's district are uninsured, 22,884 use food stamps, and 20,394 children and 7,939 seniors live in poverty.
Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO) allegedly has collected $2,409,806 campaign contributions from Wall Street while Colorado is among the top 10 states for home foreclosures, has 184,689 children in poverty, 116,941 people using food stamps, and 13,390 homeless, NNU says.
Burger says NNU is not supporting a specific bill right now. "What we know is that legislation always gets watered down. We aren't endorsing a particular piece of legislation until we are assured that it will raise more money than what I would consider 'couch change,'" she says. "Right now there are some lukewarm financial tax proposals out there, but they would only raise $1 billion or so and that is not sufficient to make a credible different in rebuilding the infrastructure."
Burger says the NNU does not want the tax applied to transactions such as home mortgages, loans, initial public offerings, publicly traded short-term debt, or mutual fund or 401(k) accounts. "Basically it is geared toward the in-and-out, speculative transactions," she says.
The estimated $350 billion in revenues that a financial transactions tax would raise was taken from a study done by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Robert Pollin, an economist at PERI and an author of the study, says the $350 billion estimate -- while possible -- probably is overly optimistic. "I myself would not argue that you are going to raise $350 billion at this rate because we have to assume some reduction in trading volume," Pollin says. "Nobody really knows how much trading volume would go down with such a tax. In my opinion probably a better estimate would be in the range of $200 billion."
NNU cites estimates that the $2.4 trillion in government bailouts to financial and other institutions already spent would have funded 63 million jobs at the national median level of about $39,000 a year.
Union organizers say the 61 members of Congress were targeted for the demonstrations both because of their high-profile on Capitol Hill, and because they lived in districts with high numbers of NNU members.
Burger says NNU elected to stage multiple rallies at legislators' home offices because they would be harder to ignore than a mass rally in Washington, DC. "Groups rally at the Capitol all the time and the get brushed under the rug and Congress is off the hook. But back in their communities, that is where they take notice," she says. "That's where their voters are."
Dead batteries, bad connections, and other malfunctions of automated external defibrillators have been linked to more than 1,000 cardiac arrest deaths over the last 15 years, a study has found.
"Survival from cardiac arrest depends on the reliable operation of AEDs," lead study author Lawrence DeLuca, MD, said in the study, which was published online in Annals of Emergency Medicine. "AEDs can truly be lifesavers but only if they are in good working order and people are willing to use them."
DeLuca's team analyzed reports to the FDA about all adverse events connected to AEDs between January 1993 and October 2008. Of the 40,787 AED-related events reported to the FDA, 1,150 of the events were linked to fatalities. Forty-five percent of the failures occurred during the attempt to charge and deliver a shock to the person in cardiac arrest.
Problems with pads and connectors accounted for 24% of the failures and battery power problems accounted for 23% of the failures.
Odds of surviving cardiac arrest decline by 7% to 10% per minute of delay in defibrillation. AEDs have become common in public places such as airports and offices, but bystanders are reluctant to use them. An Annals of Emergency Medicine study published earlier this year found that less than half of people in public places reported being willing to use an AED and more than half were unable to recognize one.
"AEDs are like any other piece of medical equipment: They can experience unexpected failures," DeLuca said. "I would recommend that people maintain AEDs as recommended by the manufacturer."
DeLuca, a physician at the University of Arizona Department of Emergency Medicine in Tucson, said that if a device fails, both the manufacturer and the FDA should be contacted. "Then be sure to return the unit and accessories such as pads or batteries to the manufacturer immediately so that it can be analyzed and a cause for the failure identified and fixed," he said.
Temporary emergency room nurses who are unfamiliar with their surroundings may inadvertently be a threat to the patients they serve, according to new research from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
The study found that the temporary help was twice as likely as permanent staff to be involved in medication errors in the hectic and fast-paced environs of the ER. However, the study's authors stressed that temporary nurses should not necessarily be blamed for those shortcomings, which the researchers said are complex and diffuse.
"A place that uses a lot of temporary staff may have more quality of care issues in general," study leader Julius Cuong Pham, MD, an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine and emergency medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a media release. "It may not be the temporary staff that causes those errors but a function of the whole system."
The nation's hospitals have become more reliant on temporary nurses and other temporary clinical staff because of widespread shortages of healthcare professionals. Temporary nurses generally earn higher wages than their permanent coworkers, but they don't receive benefits, and could be cheaper in the long run.
"It's one of those necessary evil sorts of things," Ann Marie Papa, RN, president of the Emergency Nurses Association, tells HealthLeaders Media. "Temporary help can be tremendous when you are struggling with nursing shortages but the key is that these temporary nurses are properly trained and they have proper orientation, mentoring, and supervision."
The Johns Hopkins study examined a national Internet-based voluntary medication error reporting system and data from 2000 and 2005, encompassing nearly 24,000 emergency department medication errors among 592 hospitals.
Medication errors made by temporary workers were more likely to reach the patient, result in at least temporary harm and also be life-threatening, they found. The findings appear in the July/August issue of the Journal for Healthcare Quality.
Pham said temporary personnel are often not familiar with local staff, care management systems, protocols, or procedures. This may hamper communication and teamwork that causes them difficulty in retrieving important medical information and leave them unsure of which procedures to follow.
Temporary help may be less likely to speak up if they see problems and also lag behind the latest knowledge because, unlike permanent employees, temps typically manage their own continuing education.
Papa agreed with that assessment, and said it underscores the need for hospitals to embrace their temporary staff for the time they're there, and give them the same consideration and training they would offer permanent staff.
"It is up to the organization to ensure that the new nurses, the temporary nurses, the new graduates, are properly trained about procedures, protocols, and the culture of the hospital and the department in which they are working," Papa says.
It starts with frontline charge nurses making assessments of the people they supervise to ensure their competency. "Watch them put the IV line in. Watch them interview a patient. Someone has to verify their competency," Papa says.
That alone is not enough, she says. Temporary staff needs to know they have the support of management. "Sometimes temporary nurses tell me 'I go into an organization and nobody talks to me.' There is the reason why the nurses are going to have an error, because they are afraid to ask a question," Papa says. "We have to embrace temporary nurses and help them and be their life line. There should be a charge nurse or a supervisor ready so that if the temporary nurse could say 'I am not familiar with this' or 'I don't know your policy on this,' they are ready to help."
And it's not just the temporary nurses, Papa says.
"You can take a nurse from the same hospital and move [him or her] from the ICU to the post-anesthesia unit and they still need to have a different type of orientation because the equipment and the style of patient is different. It's important that the organizations recognize this. Proper mentoring and supervisions are critical," she said.
The egregious lapses in patient safety and basic hygiene at Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas, TX have been the subject of well-deserved and very negative reviews this summer from the state and federal government and from the news media. Just read some of the astonishing deficiencies detailed in the state and federal audits – a combined 600 pages – and it's hard not to get angry, if not horrified.
As HealthLeaders Media'sMargaret Dick Tocknell pointed out last week, the sweeping deficiencies among nine broad categories at Parkland include:
Failure to dispose of soiled gloves and gowns and wash hands after treating patients
Failure to properly dispose of infectious waste, including used syringes, body fluids, used respiratory equipment and used suction equipment
Lack of stabilizing treatment in emergency department before a transfer to another acute care facility
Lack of ER screening by a qualified medical professional
Failure to identify or assess emergency severity index
Medical residents unsupervised during clinical care by either an attending physician or faculty member
ER patients in a high level of pain provided with maps and directed to go to other parts of the hospital for treatment without benefit of any other assistance
Failure to provide 24-hour nursing services
Failure to change bed linens between emergency room patients
Failure to dispose of expired medications
These deficiencies were not incidental mistakes that can not be explained away as regrettable, but understandable oversights at a major safety net hospital which is understaffed, underfunded, and stressed to carry out its mission.
Sadly, the audits paint a picture of a major health system in complete disarray. After reading these findings, it appears that a significant number of staff at Parkland simply have stopped caring. How else can we explain such fundamental flaws?
These aren't just violations of safety standards. These are violations of common sense and compassion. Nothing says "I don't care" like unwashed hands and soiled bed sheets. If Parkland Hospital had been a fast-food restaurant, inspectors would have closed it down and strapped the doors shut with yellow biohazard tape.
It is encouraging that Parkland's executives have accepted responsibility for the shortcomings, and have vowed to revamp hospital operations. It is also sad that it took allegedly at least one patient death, government audits, volumes of negative publicity, and the threat of the loss of about $417 million in Medicare and Medicaid funding before a correction plan was unveiled last week.
The Parkland audit raises larger questions about the quality of care at our nation's safety net hospitals. If it happened in Dallas, what's to say that it isn't happening elsewhere?
The audit adds weight to uncomfortable assertions about the economic tiers in U.S. healthcare delivery, and the perceived lower standard of healthcare for society's most vulnerable – the poor, the uninsured, the indigent. Those stubborn assertions might not be fair, but they are understandable, and they can't be dismissed.
Audits such as these also undermine assertions that "frivolous" medical malpractice lawsuits are driving up healthcare costs. It's a hard sell for hospitals to claim they're the victims of opportunistic trial lawyers when hospital workers aren't doing something as basic as washing their hands. Before asking patients to surrender their right to legal redress, healthcare needs to clean up its act.
A detailed study of the workplace culture at Parkland Hospital should be conducted to determine what led to this breakdown in fundamental operations, chain-of-command, accountability, and employee engagement. It is important that we know why because what happened at Parkland could happen -- and has happened -- elsewhere.
There must be caring, compassionate and competent healthcare professionals at Parkland. So, where were they? How could staff allow such wholesale chaos to occur? Were attempts to bring these potentially lethal threats to patient health and safety to light ignored or discouraged by hospital leadership? Or were the systemic failures at Parkland so great that staff simply gave up trying?
What would drive a considerable number of educated, competent, compassionate and decent healthcare professionals at Parkland to ignore the safety and well-being of their patients? How did these healthcare professionals get to this painful point?
Nearly one-third of the nation's midsized and larger businesses say they're not sure if they'll continue to offer healthcare coverage to their employees through 2014, when key provisions of the healthcare reform law take effect.
Towers Watson reports that 29% of the 368 businesses it surveyed had not decided if they would continue employer-based sponsorship for healthcare, or offset the loss of healthcare benefits with an equivalent salary increase. In the same survey, 54% of businesses said they would discontinue healthcare benefits to both pre-65 and post-65 retirees.
"With so much still unknown regarding both the short- and long-term impact of healthcare reform, most employers will not make wholesale changes to employer-sponsored health plans in 2012," Ron Fontanetta, senior health care consulting leader at Towers Watson, said in the report.
"However, a small group of employers is driving more fundamental change in 2012 by using account-based platform designs, aggressively positioning incentives, and rethinking subsidization levels."
The survey found that employer healthcare costs are projected to rise by 5.9% in 2012, compared with the 7.6% cost growth in 2011. Even with the slowing rate of healthcare inflation, 88% of employers said they will take steps to control their costs and avoid the impact of healthcare reform's excise tax.
Roughly half (45%) said they will rethink their long-term healthcare strategy in 2012, and many businesses said they don't know how they will respond to the impact of state-based insurance exchanges in 2014.
For 2012, the survey projected that the average reported annual cost of medical and pharmacy coverage will be $11,204 per employee for active coverage. Two-thirds of employers will increase employees' share-of-premium contributions for single-only coverage for 2012, and 73% will increase them for employees with dependent coverage.
"It is clear from our research that employers remain committed to providing employer-sponsored benefits for the foreseeable future," Randall Abbott, senior healthcare consulting leader at Towers Watson, said in the report. "2012 will ultimately be a defining year— the year some employers head down a path of bold and decisive actions, while others will wait and see. Whether choosing to pay or play, employers will need a strategic view for the future."
Cost shifting is expected to continue well beyond 2012. By 2013 or 2014, the survey showed that 23% of employers are considering significantly reducing their subsidization of coverage for spouses and dependents, and 19% are considering spousal waivers and surcharges when other coverage is available.
Now, only 5% of employers have, or plan to encourage, performance-based payments to providers based on the health status of plan participants by 2012, but an additional 26% are considering the implementation of this strategy for 2013 or 2014.
Robert Zirkelbach, press secretary for America's Health Insurance Plans, told HealthLeaders Media that the healthcare reforms will place a tremendous burden on the nation's businesses, in part because the emphasis is on expanding coverage and not containing costs.
"The new healthcare reform law imposes billions of dollars in new healthcare taxes and benefit mandates that will make it even harder for employers to continue offering coverage to their employees," Zirkelbach says. "In order to make healthcare coverage more affordable for families and small businesses, there needs to be a much greater focus on the underlying cost of medical care that is driving up the cost of coverage."
By a narrow majority, 53% of employers said they are confident that healthcare reform will be implemented on schedule, but 70% are skeptical that health insurance exchanges will provide a viable alternative to employer-sponsored coverage for active employees in 2014 or 2015.
Along with that uncertainty, 56% of employers believe that they will trigger the excise tax by 2018. Yet more than three-quarters believe that healthcare benefits will continue to be a key component of their employee compensation beyond 2014.
Between now and 2014, employers are planning or considering the following actions:
Increase offering of account-based health plans (17% intend to add this plan design in 2013 or 2014, which would result in nearly three in four [74%] employers offering an ABHP)
Use value-based benefit designs(49%)
Increase use of preferred networks (58%)
Further strategy changes in 2014 and 2015 include:
Substantially reduce the health care benefit value of active employees (47%)
Reduce employee health care contributions for lower-paid workers (57%)
The survey also found that:
70% of employers expect to lose grandfathered status by 2012.
57% of employers are considering rewarding or penalizing their employees based on biometric outcomes (versus 8% today).
32% don't offer healthcare coverage to part-time employees.
44% of employers now use or are considering using social media tools to impact employee health and well-being (versus 14% today), and 26% currently support or are considering supporting employee health management with the use of online games (versus 9% today).
Executives at Henry County Medical Center in Stockbridge, GA announced Wednesday that the 215-bed community hospital will affiliate with Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare.
"I am truly excited about what Piedmont Healthcare will bring to our hospital and to the citizens of Henry County," Jeff Mills, chairman of the Henry Medical Center Board of Directors, said in a joint media release with Piedmont Healthcare. "During our exhaustive selection process, Piedmont demonstrated they were the right partner for Henry Medical Center."
The deal creates a long-term lease from the Hospital Authority of Henry County and a reconstituted Board of Directors of Henry Medical Center, which will become a subsidiary of Piedmont Healthcare.
"We look forward to sharing our experience with Henry Medical Center and the Henry County community – a strong spirit of collaboration, the highest quality of care, and our solid track record and success in running community hospitals," said R. Timothy Stack, president/CEO of Piedmont Healthcare.
Not-for-profit Piedmont Healthcare now operates four hospitals in Georgia
The affiliation is expected to be in place by January, pending regulatory approval.
Under the deal, Piedmont Healthcare has agreed to:
Reconstitute the Henry Medical Center Board with majority representation by community members and physicians, although Piedmont executives will also serve on the board;
Meet all commitments made by HMC to the authority related to the provision of care to the uninsured and the indigent, and to the provision of community benefits;
Guarantee obligations of existing bond debt of HMC;
Free Henry County of its obligation to pay HMC $6 million a year for indigent care.
Work with HMC to establish new clinical services and expand existing services;
Provide sufficient funds for capital investments;
Continue HMC's support to community organizations, including local educational institutions.
Piedmont Healthcare is the parent company of flagship Piedmont Hospital, a 481-bed acute tertiary care hospital in Atlanta. Other hospitals in the system include: Piedmont Fayette Hospital, a 157-bed, acute-care community hospital in Fayetteville; Piedmont Mountainside Hospital, a 42-bed community hospital in Jasper; and Piedmont Newnan Hospital, a 143-bed, acute-care community hospital in Newnan. The health system also operates the Piedmont Heart Institute, and the Piedmont Physicians Group, with more than 140 multispecialty physicians.
Stockbridge is located about 17 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta.
Using a hospital safety checklist to reduce deadly bloodstream infections can save lives and produces a tenfold return on the cost of the program, a study from Johns Hopkins shows.
The study calculated that the reduction in bloodstream infections at intensive care units in hospitals across Michigan saved an average of $1.1 million a year.
"We already knew that the Michigan project saved lives and reduced infections," Peter J. Pronovost, MD, the lead author of the study and the director of Johns Hopkins' Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, said in a media release. "Now we know that by preventing infections, hospitals actually save money too."
The study showed that each central line-associated bloodstream infection in Michigan costs a hospital an average of $36,500 to treat. The patient safety program cost roughly $3,375 per infection averted between 2003 and 2005. The cost of putting the program in place -- mostly in devoted staff time -- was an average of $161,000 per hospital.
"It makes common sense that giving higher quality care would save you money, but before this, there was very little empirical evidence that it did," Pronovost said. "Now we have it."
Pronovost said his study does not show whether other quality improvement initiatives would yield similar financial benefit, but he said that some likely will.
Each year roughly 80,000 patients with central lines develop life-threatening infections. Of those, about 31,000 are estimated to die — nearly as many as die from breast cancer annually.
The collective cost of treating them may be as high as $3 billion nationally, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC reported bloodstream infections decreased by 58% between 2001 and 2009.
The Michigan program, developed at Johns Hopkins, includes the "cockpit-style" checklist for doctors and nurses to follow when placing a central-line catheter, and five basic steps from hand washing to avoiding placement in the groin area, where infection rates are higher. The program also promotes a "culture of safety," that includes science of safety education; training in identifying safety problems, implement solutions, and measure improvements; and empowering team members to question each other and stop procedures if safety is compromised.
Pronovost said much of the healthcare savings resulting from the initiative go to insurers — both public and private — who are spared the cost of treating these bloodstream infections and subsequent complications. Because of that, Pronovost said insurers should help hospitals implement and develop infection prevention and other quality improvement programs.
"Strategies to improve quality should be at the forefront of efforts to trim healthcare costs. Reducing preventable harm may be the least controversial way to save money and should definitely get more attention," he said.
The research was funded by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan, through the Michigan Hospital Association.
St. Joseph's Women's Hospital has opened its $75 million 64-suite neonatal intensive care unit, which houses 15 Level II and 49 Level III beds, the Tampa, FL hospital announced.
The NICU occupies two floors of the five-story addition that also doubles the size of the hospital's breast imaging center.
The Hinks and Elaine Shimberg Breast Center on the ground floor provides diagnostic tools and resources including CT scanner, ultrasound, DEXA scan, digital mammography, MRI, Computer-aided Detection and minimally invasive biopsies. There, patient care is coordinated by an interventional team that includes board-certified radiologists, physician assistants, biopsy technologist, nurse navigator and biopsy scheduler, St. Joseph's said.
The expansion also includes 36 private patient suites for new mothers and a dedicated 16-bed gynecology unit for medical and surgical patients. A staff nurse navigator provides resources for the patients and their families, the hospital said.
The expansion features:
All private NICU suites with an in-room family area
All-digital diagnostic imaging services
All-private suites for Women's Care patients (obstetrics, gynecology, surgical) with full bathroom and in-room family area
Each NICU private room provides a "womb-like setting" to help premature babies develop faster, improve patient safety, and better accommodate families, St. Joseph's said in a media release.
St. Joseph's Women's Hospital is part of 10-hospital, not-for-profit BayCare Health System and is the only hospital in the Tampa Bay area dedicated to women and infants.
