Blue Shield Lets Members Manage Care Online
The hospital industry and nursing groups are continuing their war of words. This time, the question of mandatory overtime for workers is the target.
The California Nurses Association is throwing its weight behind a new federal bill that would prohibit mandatory overtime for licensed healthcare workers, excluding physicians. The association represents nurses at UCI Medical Center, Orange.
“This is a public health issue as much as it is an issue of exploiting workers,” said bill co-author U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, a Silicon Valley Democrat, in a release. “Exhausted healthcare workers can inadvertently and unintentionally put patients’ safety at risk.”
If the bill passes, it would amend the federal Fair Labor Standards Act to bar mandatory overtime beyond eight hours in a single workday or 80 hours in any 14-day work period. Exceptions include a natural disaster or a declaration of emergency by federal, state or local government officials. Voluntary overtime also is exempted.
Bill proponents are casting it as an ingredient in easing the national nursing shortage. “Throughout the country, too many hospitals are requiring forced overtime as a substitute for regular scheduled staffing,” said Kay McVay, president of the California Nurses Association who trained at UCI when it was Orange County General Hospital.
The California Nurses Association and other nursing groups have argued that the nursing shortage is a creation of industry policies dating back to the 1990s, when managed care was in its heyday. The California Healthcare Association and other groups counter that nurses’ groups are unwilling to let go of the past and move forward on ideas to solve the nursing shortage.
Not surprisingly, the hospital industry is gearing up to fight.
“We do not support the bill,” said Carla Luggiero, senior associate director of federal relations for the Washington, D.C.-based American Hospital Association. “Even though hospitals will use mandatory overtime, it’s a tool of last resort.
“The reality of the situation is that we care for patients 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We have no control over who shows up and how many people show up,” Luggiero said. “This is a problem for us.”
As for the nursing shortage argument, “though nurses are leaving the profession, it’s not all related to working conditions,” said Luggiero, a registered nurse herself. Other factors that affect it, according to Luggiero, include fewer people entering the profession, an aging workforce and the pending retirement of baby boom-age registered nurses.
Blue Shield Goes Online
More healthcare service providers are embracing the Internet. The latest example is Blue Shield of California, the San Francisco-based managed care company with 240,000 OC members.
Blue Shield unrolled mylifepath.com approximately a week ago. The site offers members health and personalized benefits information. Among other things, members will be able to get detailed information about their benefits, let the plan know if they want to change their personal physician, add or delete dependents, fill prescriptions and get health questions answers.
About half of Blue Shield’s members will be able to access the personalized benefit information at first, with nearly all able to do it by year’s end, according to the company.
UCI Cancer Center Gets Funds
The Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at University of California, Irvine, received $2 million from the Avon Products Foundation. The money is earmarked to expand breast cancer research and to boost diagnostic and treatment programs for low-income women.
The Chao center is one of several academic medical centers and service organizations that is receiving money from the foundation, an offshoot of cosmetics giant Avon Products Inc. Avon plans to award $16.2 million for those purposes.
In addition to medical services, the Avon gift will fund six new UCI research projects. They include: developing a breast cancer vaccine, by Dr. Edward Nelson, assistant professor of medicine; and discerning the 3-D molecular structure of a cellular protein implicated in breast and cervical cancer, by Frances Jurnak, professor of physiology and biophysics; and determining the specific types of white blood cells and other immunity components that are activated by cancer, in order to develop tailor-made disease treatment, by Drs. Randall Holcombe, John Butler and Tomasz Pawlawski of the Chao center.
Bits and Pieces:
In other UCI-related news, outgoing students at the university’s College of Medicine recently learned where they would spend their residencies at “Match Day.” Eighty-eight of 92 students were matched into medical residency training programs, while the other four were matched up during the “scramble,” where administrators look for programs that still need a resident or two Beckman Coulter Inc., Fullerton, assumed U.S. distribution responsibilities for IL Test hemostasis products from Fisher Healthcare of Hampton, N.H. The test kits are used on ACL-brand coagulation analyzers, for which Beckman has exclusive North American distribution rights ARV Assisted Living Inc., Costa Mesa, entered into two new master lease agreements with Nationwide Health Properties Inc., Newport Beach, covering 16 assisted living communities.
