Newman said:
“Staffing is among the most crucial parts of a hospital operation, as we have all seen during this pandemic. Staffing determines if an ER or an ICU can keep accepting patients, how many surgeries can be performed at once, and the quality of care patients are likely to receive.”
It is important as ever for hospitals to be transparent about the number of COVID cases among their staff.”
Specifically, the bill would require general acute care hospitals to regularly provide information on any staffing shortages of nurses, layoffs of nurses, furloughs of nurses, cancellation of shifts, and COVID-19 cases and deaths among staff to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). Facilities would be required to provide this information weekly during a statewide public health crisis and monthly at all other times.
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New York City and California to Require Vaccines or Tests for Workers
California and New York City announced the mandates for their employees, while the Department of Veterans Affairs said frontline health care workers must get vaccinated or face possible termination.
Lagging vaccination rates and the spread of the more contagious Delta variant have led to cases in New York City surging past 1,000 per day recently.Credit.James Estrin/The New York Times
July 26, 2021, 7:47 p.m. ET
The push to mandate coronavirus vaccinations amid sharply rising caseloads nationwide accelerated on Monday, as the country’s most populous state and its largest city both announced that they would require hundreds of thousands of government workers to get inoculations or face weekly testing.
Reuters – July 20
From building sea walls to nurturing “living” seashores, an array of potential solutions to rising sea levels have been discussed by local authorities up and down the coast, but all are expensive and none had come up with a way of addressing the cost - until now. Under a proposed state bill, a “revolving” fund would be set up to provide soft loans for cities to buy vulnerable seaside properties from willing sellers, and then rent them back to the owners or tenants for as long as they remained habitable. The proposal has been billed as the first strategic attempt to address the task of moving coastal cities back from rising seas, and it could also help local government leaders maintain the stream of revenue with rental income.
Detroit-area nurses give ten-day strike notice at McLaren Macomb Hospital
Nurses at McLaren Macomb Hospital in Mount Clemens, Michigan gave a ten-day notice to management last Sunday stating that they intend to go on strike if a new contract is not agreed to when the old agreement expires on July 27.
Representatives from Local 40 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) informed McLaren that the 530 nurses will walk out if staffing issues at the 228-bed hospital are not resolved by the deadline.
Members of OPEIU Local 40 picket Ascension Providence Rochester Hospital in 2020 (credit: OPEIU Local 40)
Nurses at McLaren Macomb have been forced to work with a shortage of more than 10 percent of the contractually required staffing levels and have not been able to effectively provide health care services to hospital patients. Hospital management has failed to replace 70 nurses and claimed that this is due to a nationwide nursing shortage.