Recently in Health Category

Source: Micah Maidenberg, Progress Illinois,  Wednesday September 1st, 2010, 3:45pm

 

Legislation that would have given a department commissioner more power to contract out city services was averted at Chicago's City Hall this morning. The Chicago City Council Committee on Health signed off on an ordinance allowing the commissioner of the Department of Public Health to strike contracts with a variety of organizations that provide midwife and pulmonary services through January 1, 2017.

 ....... What remains unclear is why the Daley Administration apparently sought broader contracting powers for the department when the mayor initially introduced the legislation on July 28. 

Source: By William Kibler, Altoona Mirror, August 16, 2010

 

Dustan Rhodes is a 35-year-old veteran with Lou Gehrig's disease who lives in the Hollidaysburg Veterans Home and needs to conserve energy, said occupational therapist assistant Joan Franks.

But against Franks' advice, Rhodes took the trouble to tell the Mirror recently about the state's intention to outsource all the work done by Franks and eight other employees in the physical and occupational therapy department.

.... A contract provision allows the state to outsource the work if it can realize "reasonable" cost savings, he said.

Source: By ALGIS J. LAUKAITIS, Lincoln Journal Star (NE) Friday, August 13, 2010 1

The Lancaster County Board closed the deal Friday and sold Lancaster Manor to a Nebraska company established by Hunter Management of Evanston, Ill., for $9.5 million. The buyer is Lancaster Manor Real Estate, which now owns the land and assets of the nursing home at 1001 South St. Financing was arranged by American National Bank of Nebraska.

..... Kaspar and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2468, and a grass-roots opposition group called Save the Manor Coalition, brought to light a litany of problems at nursing homes owned by the Rothner family in Illinois and other states.

Source: By Henri E. Cauvin, Washington Post (VA), Thursday, July 22, 2010

 

.......Across the country, states have been closing such places for years, moving people with mental disabilities into community homes and out of the institutions that defined care of the developmentally disabled for much of the 20th century.

.... Nationwide, the number of developmentally disabled people in institutions has been falling for decades as the country's attitudes and laws have evolved. The shift culminated in a 1999 Supreme Court decision that said "confinement in an institution severely diminishes the everyday life activities of individuals."

Although several states have closed all of their large institutions, most still operate some. The number they house has fallen to about 33,000, from 186,743 in 1970 and 84,239 in 1990, according to the Research and Training Center on Community Living at the University of Minnesota.

Source: Union of American Physicians and Dentists, 2009

Last year UAPD filed charges with the California State Personnel Board (SPB) over the contracting out of psychiatric services at the Department of Mental Health's (DMH) Atascadero State Hospital facility.  The Union argued that paying over $200 an hour to nearly 50 outside contractors was exacerbating, not alleviating,  the shortage of permanent civil service employees, and that the Department's use of  contractors violated Government Code. 

UAPD appealed an initial ruling from the SPB Executive Officer, who was not persuaded by our commonsense arguments, and we are now happy to report that the SPB has issued an order requiring DMH to go through an evidentiary hearing before an Administrative Law judge to answer questions like "How did the Department come to compensate its contract psychiatrists at a rate so much higher than that paid to civil servant psychiatrists?" and "Has the high compensation paid by the Department to its contract psychiatrists resulted in a shortage of civil servant psychiatrists at Atascadero State Hospital?" 

UAPD through its attorneys will provide evidence at the hearing, a date for which has not yet been set.   

Source: By Kurt Erickson, Pantagraph (IL), Wednesday, April 22, 2009

 

 Hoping to combat rising medical costs, Illinois prison officials have quietly begun investigating a new way to treat inmates.  A review of state documents shows that Illinois Department of Corrections Director Roger Walker met late last year with a top doctor from the Texas prison system.  The subject of their December 11 meeting at Corrections headquarters in Springfield was telemedicine, in which inmates receive medical advice from a doctor linked to the prison via video conferencing equipment.

..... "We don't know what they might be looking at. At face value we don't believe telemedicine in a prison setting is a good idea," said Anders Lindall, spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. ...... It isn't clear how much Texas saves by using telemedicine.

...... Schnapp said there is no timetable for implementing telemedicine.

Source: Aaron Deslatte, Orlando Sentinel (FL), Apr 7, 2009 10:09:34 AM


 With billion-dollar budget decisions looming, Florida House members have devoted a lot of time the last few days to a comparatively microscopic financial concern: whether or not to save just over $3 million next year by privatizing a mental health hospital in Baker County.

Last week, the hospital privatization -- pushed by House and Senate leaders and lobbyists for GEO Care, which runs two other South Florida mental health facilities -- was removed from the House budget plan only to be re-inserted by House Speaker Larry Cretul, R-Ocala.

Source:By Stacy Forster, Journal Sentinel (WI), Mar. 19, 2009

 

A computer glitch at the state Department of Health Services caused 5,000 Wisconsin Medicare recipients to be mistakenly notified they were ineligible for benefits that should have been paid.

...... In January 2008, contractor EDS Corp. mailed 260,000 brochures to Medicaid recipients that included their Social Security numbers on the address labels. In late 2006, a different contractor printed 171,000 tax forms with Social Security numbers on the mailing labels.

Source:By BRIAN IANIERI, Press of Atlantic City (NJ),Wednesday, March 25, 2009

 

The kitchen in the Crest Haven Nursing Home is staffed by county employees afraid they will lose their jobs to outsourcing.  The concern spread to other areas of government - including housekeeping, facilities and services - as the county, which passed its budget in March without layoffs, is already studying cost-cutting measures for next year. ...... Joe Gariffo is president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3596, which represents more than half of the county's employees.

Source: Niklas Hansen, Magnus Sverke, Katharina Näswall, Journal of Nursing Studies, Volume 46, Issue 1, Pages 96-107 (January 2009)

 ....... The results showed that the burnout levels were the highest at the private for-profit hospital and lowest at the publicly administered hospital. However, in contrast to expectations the demands were not higher overall at the for-profit organization or lowest at the public administration unit, and overall, resources were not better in the private for-profit or worse at the publicly administered hospital. Multiple regression analyses showed that several of the demands included were related to higher burnout levels. Job resources were linked to lower burnout levels, but not for all variables.

Conclusions

Profit orientation in health care seems to result in higher burnout levels for registered nurses compared to a publicly administered hospital. In general, demands were more predictive of burnout than resources, and there were only marginal differences in the pattern of predictors across hospitals.