California Hospital News Roundup for the Week of June 8, 2012
Children's Hospital Los Angeles
Children's Hospital Los Angeles recently opened an outpatient clinic in Valencia, the Los Angeles Daily News reports.
The facility had its soft opening on March 1 and plans to be fully operational by the end of the summer. The clinic offers various outpatient pediatric services, such as pediatric pulmonology, endocrinology and oncology.
Kelly Iwanabe, the clinic's administrator, said that 11 physicians eventually will be assigned to the clinic (Wilcox, Los Angeles Daily News, 5/31).
Children's Hospital Los Angeles; Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego
U.S. News & World Report has ranked Children's Hospital Los Angeles fifth on its Honor Roll of 12 U.S. children's hospitals with the highest scores in at least three specialties, U-T San Diego reports (Lavelle, U-T San Diego, 6/5).
Rankings for the 2012-2013 U.S. News Best Children's Hospitals were based on a survey sent to hospitals and another survey that asked pediatric specialists to name the hospitals they consider the best for treating children with serious or difficult conditions (Comarow, U.S. News & World Report, 6/5).
Rady's Children's Hospital-San Diego ranked second among the best children's hospitals for orthopedics and ninth among the best facilities for urology, according to the list (U-T San Diego, 6/5).
Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital; St. Joseph Hospital, Orange; Tri-City Medical Center, Oceanside
Becker's Hospital Review has named Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital as the third-best hospital in the U.S. for heart attack treatment.
Becker's ranked the top 50 hospitals for heart attack treatment based on readmission rates within 30 days of patients experiencing heart attacks.
The publication ranked St. Joseph Hospital in Orange as the fifth best hospital in the country for heart attack treatment (Oh, Becker's Hospital Review, 5/17). Oceanside's Tri-City Medical Center was ranked as the sixth-best hospital in the U.S. for heart attack treatment (Scharn, U-T San Diego, 6/2).
Santa Rosa Memorial, St. Joseph and Tri-City were the only California hospitals among the top 10 in the Becker's list (Becker's Hospital Review, 5/17).
Scripps Green Hospital, La Jolla
Last week, physicians and patients at Scripps Green Hospital announced that the hospital had become part of the first international kidney paired transplant chain, U-T San Diego reports.
Kidney paired donations occur when a donor who is incompatible with a designated kidney recipient pledges to donate a kidney to an unfamiliar person so the designee can receive a compatible kidney from another stranger.
The transplant chain -- arranged by the Alliance for Paired Donation -- involved participants in several U.S. states and Greece (Ignelzi, U-T San Diego, 6/1).
Sutter Health, San Francisco Bay Area
California Nurses Association-National Nurses United has announced a one-day strike at Sutter Health hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area that will take place June 13, the Contra Costa Times reports.
The strike is part of an ongoing contract dispute centered around health benefits, sick pay, workplace standards and other issues.
According to union leaders, the strike will affect nearly 4,500 nurses and hundreds of health care technicians (Kleffman, Contra Costa Times, 6/4).
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