News, advice, and insights for nurses and the people who hire them.
Alaska has added more than 11,000 health care jobs in the last decade. But they’re still seeing a shortage of nurses, especially in specialized areas like operating room nursing, according to a story by KTVA. There are an abundance of Alaskans who are qualified to take entry-level positions in nursi...
Read more →A proposed rule would save healthcare providers and health plans up to $4.6 billion over the next 10 years, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the center of it is a unique identifier for each health plan. It would simplify administrative processes for ho...
Read more →In the Atlantic, Christine Mackey-Ross writes about the importance of improving the quality of health care, not just driving down costs, and the new breed of health care leaders that have been attracted by this challenge: physician and nurse executives. Many organizations are now forming Accountable...
Read more →Alexander Raths – Fotolia.com Baby Boomers a Driving Force Behind Demand for Nurses In its biannual Employment Outlook report, the U.S. Department of Labor stated that the healthcare and social assistance fields would experience the highest growth for new jobs, with more than 5 million new workers n...
Read more →Jaimie Duplass – Fotolia.com A study indicates that the nursing shortage is over, but that it will likely come roaring back. By 2020, it might be more difficult than ever to fill nursing vacancies. An article in the Detroit News indicates that the the number of full-time nurses grew by about 386,000...
Read more →James Steidl – Fotolia.com Paying Hospitals Didn’t Improve Mortality Rates A study by the New England Journal of Medicine has cast doubt on a central premise of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA took inspiration from Medicare’s efforts to pay hospitals based on how they perform, which was thoug...
Read more →An article in the New York Times explains a new type of health care practice called accountable care organizations, or A.C.O.s. The article takes the case of Fannie Cline as an example of how A.C.O.s work. Mrs. Cline, a 69-year-old retiree, was struggling to manage her Type 2 diabetes, suffering set...
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Image courtesy of markhillary via Flickr A study from France has found that a shortage of beds in hospital intensive care units may mean that more patients die. An article from Reuters reports on the study, which focused on 10 hospitals in western France. The researchers found that almost 15% of the...
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The Texas Health Care Association said that Texas’s skilled nursing facility sector will continue to be a significant source of new jobs throughout the state in an article in the Bradenton Herald. They cited a new report from the U.S. Department of Labor which projects that the health care and socia...
Read more →A new study that is part of the RN Work Project has shown that state-mandated caps on mandatory nursing overtime has a positive effect on patient safety. The laws effectively reduce overtime hours, which have been shown to reduce fatigue and the problems that come along with it, such as increased mi...
Read more →A major strike took place in California yesterday, one of the largest in the history of Kaiser hospitals in the state. A total of about 22,000 people including about 4,000 mental and optical health care workers at Kaiser hospitals, plus thousands of registered Kaiser nurses in the California Nurses...
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Although the number of medical errors probably aren’t actually increasing, the number of reported errors has risen. In the past, clinicians, including nurses, could face an immediate suspension or firing for a medical error. After a 1999 study in which the Institute of Medicine reported that approxi...
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