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Boston police and hospital security staff are considering plans to link their radio communications and to conduct training for "active shooter" scenarios after a psychiatric patient was shot dead last week at a doctor's office. Security directors from 18 hospitals met yesterday at Boston police headquarters to discuss security, intelligence sharing and other issues facing hospital safety personnel, said police Superintendent ...

Efforts to require flu shots for health care workers in order to protect vulnerable patients are being abandoned by some major health systems because of legal challenges and vaccine shortages. Requiring flu shots is an exception in the health care industry, where 48% of workers were vaccinated against flu last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The ...

October 29 2009 Los Angeles pharmaceutical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong announced plans Wednesday to provideUniversity of California regents with a $100-million guaranty underwriting the county's latest proposal to reopen long-troubled Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital by 2012. 

Oct. 26--OXFORD -- Want to see Dr. Tom Fowlkes at his clinic in Oxford? Bring cash. It sounds odd -- maybe even a bit sinister -- at first, since most Americans are accustomed to filling out reams of forms when they visit a doctor, and many expect to pay a co-pay. But the whole fee up front? Fowlkes, a board-certified emergency ...

Many MRI patients are injected with a GE dye to enhance images. If they have weak kidneys, they might develop a rare and sometimes fatal disease Editor's Note: Gerth is a reporter with ProPublica, a nonprofit journalism organization in New York. For more on GE and MRI drugs, go to http://www.propublica.org. In May 2006 medical regulators in Denmark issued a warning ...

  Only after a patient complained in August about losing some hair following a CT scan did Cedars-Sinai Medical Center realize more than 200 people had been exposed to excessive radiation from diagnostic tests performed there in the last year and a half. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where more than 200 patients were exposed patients to excess radiation during ...

Tinkering with a complicated piece of machinery's default settings can be risky. Consider the situation at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. The plan was to improve stroke diagnoses, but adjustments to the CT scanner's settings resulted in more than 200 radiation overdoses. A hospital spokesman said about 40 percent of the patients lost patches of hair as a result. Hospital officials said ...

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Police were looking into possible criminal charges against a nurse at a South Florida hospital where officials say she may have exposed more than 1,800 patients to HIV and hepatitis by reusing medical supplies. Officials at Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale said earlier this week the hospital discovered that Qui Lan, 59, was reusing ...

We've all heard stories of people who enter a hospital for an operation or other treatment, only to wind up worse off after a surgeon accidentally left a sponge inside their bodies or the patient was infected by an unsanitary surgical tool. Under the law, non-profit hospitals are immune from lawsuits for such mistakes (only the specific doctors who performed the ...

New York City hospitals lost a lobbying battle with nurses Wednesday when Gov. David Paterson signed into law a bill that will force them to disclose their nurse staffing ratios. The bill had been bitterly opposed by the state's hospital trade groups, which feared it would put the state one step closer to legislation that could mandate their ratio of nurses ...

Dirty-handed hospital workers contribute to hospital-associated infections that kill nearly 100,000 Americans annually, a U.S. non-profit group says. Officials at the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, affiliated with The Joint Commission, which accredits and certifies more than 16,000 U.S. healthcare organizations and programs, say failing to wash hands not only cause infections that kill 100,000 Americans, they cost U.S. hospitals ...

Hospitals in Texas can no longer require registered nurses and licensed vocational nurses to work mandatory overtime. The law, which went into effect Tuesday, makes Texas the 15th state to prohibit the practice of forcing nurses to work longer than their scheduled shifts. "It's very, very important for patient safety," said Fernando Losada, state director of the National Nurses Organizing Committee ...

DAYTON - Rebecca Aygarn Talkie can't recall if she was fearful of undergoing open-heart surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital on Nov. 13, 1959. She was 4. But Talkie does remember being "very upset" at being placed in a crib, and jealous of a child who had more toys than her. Talkie, one of the region's first open-heart patients, was among the ...

The U.S. government is using $40 million of Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to help hospitals fight healthcare-associated infections. "Americans expect to get better when they go to the hospital, not worse," Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services said in a statement. "Unfortunately, every year, thousands of Americans die from illness they contract after they enter the hospital." The ...

A nurses' union has asked a court to block a request by two accused killers for the last names of nurses working at the King County Jail in Seattle. Margaret Conley, an official with the Washington State Nurses Association, said nurses at the jail fear inmates could get their home telephone numbers and addresses if they have their last names, Seattlepi.com ...

Deb Lustman was late getting to work a few days every week, and often felt she wasn't thinking as clearly as she once did. The reason: Lustman, 50, was spending four hours a day, three days a week, undergoing kidney dialysis at a dialysis center, where a machine filtered toxins and fluids from her blood. Normally, that's the job of the ...

The California Nurses Association, one of the most powerful unions in the state, has endorsed Desiree Menchaka's grass-roots effort to petition Kaiser Permanente to maintain its after-hours care clinics as they operate in Stockton, Manteca, Tracy and Modesto -- all in California. Registered nurses will be out in force Saturday afternoon near Stockton's large Kaiser complex with informational picket signs, helping ...

After reviewing 82 studies, Canadian researchers say non-profit nursing homes give better care. The findings of the meta-analysis for thousands of mostly U.S.and some Canadian and Taiwanese nursing homes are published in the British Medical Journal. The studies of mostly U.S. nursing homes, but also some Canadian and Taiwanese nursing homes gauged care using measures such as the need for physical ...

There was a 39 percent increase from 1997 to 2007 in U.S. patients leaving hospitals against doctors' advice, officials of a U.S. agency said. The report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, said the number of cases rose from 264,000 in 1997 to 368,000 in 2007. The top five ...

CNN.com today features an article helping to empower patients and family members in the hospital.  Mistakes are made every day in all healthcare systems, and the points brought up in the article can help increase the accuracy and safety of care provided.