The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
The allure of a fulfilling career in healthcare, coupled with the charm of a city steeped in history and culture, makes Memphis, TN, an enticing destination for Registered Nurses (RNs) and Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs). Memphis’s medical landscape is flourishing, with a growing demand for skilled and compassionate RNs across various specialties.
Continue reading What is the Salary Range for RN Jobs in Memphis, TN?
Proper staffing is critical for healthcare facilities to provide high-quality care and ensure positive outcomes for patients. Understaffing is an ongoing problem that threatens patient safety and leads to nurse burnout and turnover. Healthcare administrators must make staffing a top priority and deploy the right number of nurses, physicians, and other personnel to handle the volume and acuity of patients.
Continue reading The Crucial Role of Proper Staffing in Healthcare Facilities
It is essential that medical facilities take steps to ensure their equipment is safe for use. Unsafe equipment could lead to patients and even staff being injured or even killed. In such situations, medical facilities can be taken to court and sued civilly. Lawsuits of this kind can bankrupt hospitals and doctors’ surgeries. If you are in charge of a medical facility, then it is absolutely essential that you take steps to ensure your equipment is completely safe for use.
This post will cover this in more detail, telling you how you can ensure that equipment is safe for use on patients.
Continue reading How Can Medical Facilities Ensure Their Equipment Is Completely Safe to Use
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Englewood NJ, claiming the merger would hurt consumers, a federal appeals court on Tuesday blocked the proposed merger of Englewood Health and Hackensack Meridian Health. The court said ,”consumers would likely be disadvantaged because Englewood would no longer have an incentive to outperform HUMC” .
“As we’ve learned during the pandemic, the governor’s refusal to listen to others is a recipe disaster.”
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Paramus NJ, Senator Anthony M. Bucco said Governor Phil Murphy still has no plan to address worker shortages that are almost certain to impact hospitals, long-term care facilities, and prisons as a result of his stricter vaccine mandate.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Trenton NJ, an alliance of New Jersey advocacy organizations working with impacted state residents announced intervention in an ongoing lawsuit to stop the implementation of a recently passed state law exempting non-profit hospitals from property taxation even if for-profit business is conducted on hospital property. Plaintiff interveners NJ Citizen Action and the American Federation of Teachers NJ (AFTNJ) argue the law violates the State Constitution’s uniformity and exemption clauses.
“To facilitate this review, the Governor directs each of you to submit updated plans describing the essential activities of
your department, meaning those necessary to maintain the health,safety, and welfare of the citizens of the State, and to prevent
the damage, loss, or destruction of property, if any. As you know, these activities should be limited and directly related to the
preservation and protection of life, safety and property; the care of those in State facilities, hospitals, centers, and homes; child
welfare; disease prevention and control; emergency and disaster response activities; transportation safety; the preparation and
adoption of the State Budget; and similar activities.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Dozens of countries were hit with a huge cyberextortion attack Friday that locked up computers and held users’ files for ransom at a multitude of hospitals, companies and government agencies.
It was believed to the biggest attack of its kind ever recorded.
The malicious software behind the onslaught appeared to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that was supposedly identified by the National Security Agency for its own intelligence-gathering purposes and was later leaked to the internet.
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2015, 12:03 AM
BY LINDY WASHBURN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
After years of managed-care wars between health care providers and insurance companies, New Jersey’s largest insurer is to announce Thursday an alliance with six hospital systems and the state’s largest physician group to get these erstwhile competitors on the same side. The plan is to work together to coordinate patient care, lower costs and use financial incentives to steer patients to its 22 member hospitals and affiliated doctors.
Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey will offer insurance plans for 2016 that will encourage members to use a select group of “Tier One” hospitals by offering a financial incentive — waiving the deductible and the coinsurance for some of the care they receive.
Members will still be able to use Horizon’s broader network — which includes all but three of the state’s hospitals and about 80 percent of its physicians — but will pay more in out-of-pocket expenses to do so. Patients who go to hospitals in other states will also pay more in out-of-pocket costs.
Details of the premiums and cost sharing are to be announced in October when the plans go on the market, a Horizon spokesman said.
They will not be available to Medicaid or Medicare patients but will be included as an option for state employees. Dudley Burdge, senior staff representative for the Communications Workers of America union local representing state workers, expects that premiums “will be 25 percent less than the most popular plan for state employees.”
The Tier One hospitals in Bergen County will be Hackensack University Medical Center, HackensackUMC North at Pascack Valley in Westwood and Englewood Hospital Medical Center — all part of the Hackensack University Health Network, one of the six health systems to join the newly formed Omnia Health Alliance.
Shefali Luthra, Kaiser Health News
2:47 AM, Mar 31, 2015
4 hours ago
New designs, though, can be expensive. After Valley Hospital of Ridgewood, N.J., switched to pajamas and gowns that provide extra coverage, costs went up $70,000 per year, said Leonard Guglielmo, the facility’s chief supply chain officer, because the new garments cost more to buy and maintain.
Whether a patient is in the hospital for an organ transplant, an appendectomy or to have a baby, one complaint is common: the gown.
You know the one. It might as well have been stitched together with paper towels and duct tape, and it usually leaves the wearer’s behind hanging out.
“You’re at the hospital because something’s wrong with you – you’re vulnerable – then you get to wear the most vulnerable garment ever invented to make the whole experience that much worse,” said Ted Streuli, who lives in Edmond, Okla., and has had to wear hospital gowns on multiple occasions.
Put another way: “They are horrible. They are demeaning. They are belittling. They are disempowering,” said Camilla McRory of Olney, Md.
The gowns are among the most vexing parts of being in the hospital. But if efforts by some health systems are an indicator, the design may be on its way out of style.
NJ court says hospitals can keep internal error reviews private
By Anne Zieger | October 1, 2014
Dive Brief:
A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling has concluded that hospitals’ internal review reports written after adverse events occur should remain private.
The ruling relies on the 2004 Patient Safety Act, which protects healthcare worker confidentiality in an effort to let them be more candid when errors are made.
The ruling allows Valley Hospital of Ridgewood, NJ to keep a memo to itself that was written after events that led to allegations in a medical malpractice case.
Dive Insight:
According to the court, there is abundant reason to protect these privacy privileges. In its ruling, it noted that the legislators who drafted the Patient Safety Act had created an “absolute privilege,” bearing in mind that “healthcare professionals and other provider staff are more likely to effectively assess adverse events in a confidential setting, in which an employee need not fear recrimination for disclosing his or her own medical error, or that of a colleague.”
https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/nj-court-says-hospitals-can-keep-internal-error-reviews-private/315443/
A new playbook for hospitals: How investors pursue a financial turnaround
AUGUST 24, 2014, 10:34 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 2014, 11:21 PM
BY LINDY WASHBURN
STAFF WRITER
THE RECORD
A century ago, a nun often stood outside a factory in the city of Passaic on paydays, holding a tin cup as she begged for donations to care for the poor at St. Mary’s Hospital. It was an era before health insurance, before Medicare and Medicaid, and before health care became the fastest growing sector of the American economy.
Sister Agnes believed in St. Mary’s mission, just as the two nuns still serving at the hospital do today. But to save their hospital, the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth just sold it to a company for which medicine is a business, not a ministry.
As California-based Prime Healthcare Services takes over St. Mary’s and awaits approval to buy three other New Jersey hospitals, it is joining a fast-changing industry that now pumps more than $20 billion a year into the state economy. Prime and other companies look at hospitals like St. Mary’s — hospitals in such grave financial condition that their survival is in doubt — and see the potential for very healthy profits.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/a-new-playbook-for-hospitals-how-investors-pursue-a-financial-turnaround-1.1072991#sthash.yfZn5r0m.dpuf
