California Hospital News Roundup for December 7, 2007
On Tuesday, Community Regional Medical Center unveiled its new neuroscience unit, including 52 new patient beds, the Fresno Bee reports.
The unit includes about $3 million in new equipment and technology used primarily in surgery, according to the Bee (Correa, Fresno Bee, 12/4).
Kaiser Permanente has postponed construction of a $600 million, 300-bed hospital in San Leandro that was slated to begin next year, the San Francisco Business Times reports. The facility will replace Kaiser's Hayward Medical Center.
Luke Sims, San Leandro's community development director, said Kaiser wants to resolve infrastructure issues with the city before asking its board for approval. He added that an extended deadline for hospitals to meet state seismic safety standards gave Kaiser "an opportunity to prioritize which facilities need to be rebuilt when."
Construction of the San Leandro facility could begin by 2009, Sims said. He added that Kaiser has not filed a formal application to the city or provided details of the project (Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, 11/30).
The Division of Labor Standards Enforcement has ordered Rady Children's Hospital to pay about $2.8 million to current and former employees for violating state law governing break times for workers, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
Payments to the workers average $1,000 and range from a few dollars to $25,000 after taxes, according to the agency. The employees were not properly paid for a second meal break after working shifts of at least 10 hours.
Hospital officials said the violation was the result of a bookkeeping error (Darcé, San Diego Union-Tribune, 12/5).
On Tuesday, the Joint Commission restored full accreditation status to Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The hospital's status was downgraded to provisional accreditation last month after failing to meet standards for avoiding unapproved abbreviations in medical documents.
The hospital has corrected the problems, the commission said (Leonard, Los Angeles Times, 12/5).
The Sequoia Healthcare District last week approved a deal to transfer ownership of Sequoia Hospital to Catholic Healthcare West, the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Cote, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/1).
The agreement includes a $240 million project to upgrade the facility to meet seismic safety standards and build a new hospital, parking garage and medical offices.
Funding for the project will be shared evenly among the health care district, CHW and Sequoia Health Services, a partnership of CHW and the district that has owned the hospital since 1996. The remaining funds will come from fundraising (Bishop, Oakland Tribune, 12/1).
In exchange for the $75 million contribution, Sequoia will receive half the hospital's earnings for 40 years (San Francisco Chronicle, 12/1).
Effective Dec. 1, Sutter Roseville Medical Center terminated its contract with Medi-Cal for inpatient surgical services, making it the 15th hospital in California to sever relations with the program since 2002, the Sacramento Bee reports. Two of those hospitals later renegotiated their contracts with Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program.
Sutter Roseville will continue to provide emergency and trauma services to Medi-Cal beneficiaries, but they will be transferred to other facilities as soon as they are stable. The facility also will continue to contract with Medi-Cal for:
- Outpatient treatment;
- Laboratory services;
- Physical therapy; and
- Other ancillary services.