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Pierce County works to improve COVID vaccine access as wider eligibility looms
News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash. 3/13/2021 Debbie Cockrell and Josephine Peterson, The News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.)
Mar. 13 Amid recent federal and state announcements of accelerated timelines for COVID-19 vaccinations and reopening the economy and schools, Pierce County is continuing to adapt its own systems to keep up.
Adding call center access for those without computers, improving the technical side of registering and sending information to the state, and improving the flow through the mass vaccination clinics have all been ongoing works of progress.
According to Kayla Scrivner, immunization branch director for the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department: We re adding more and more staff to that call center and have been capturing and tracking that . And through social media, if people reach out to us, we make sure they know about future events, or if they ve had trouble registering
Despite free COVID-19 testing in Washington state, people are fighting big bills
COVID-19 testing is supposed to be free in Washington state, but some people are receiving bills for hundreds of dollars. Author: Michelle Li (KING5) Updated: 8:57 AM PST March 12, 2021
SEATTLE When Tawna Gogolin felt sick this summer, she worried it might be COVID-19. I went online to see COVID testing near me - saw in Bonney Lake that CHI [Franciscan] was doing drive-up COVID testing, Gogolin said. I asked, Do I need an appointment? They said, No. If you re having symptoms, come on in.
When she arrived at the July drive-up testing site she pulled into the parking lot and parked in a stall. She remembers waiting next to what appeared to be a mother and her child who were both getting a test.
St. Michael hospital settles class-action lawsuit over unpaid breaks
BREMERTON St. Michael Medical Center has settled a class-action lawsuit brought by a nurse who alleged staff members weren’t properly compensated for lunch and other breaks.
The 2019 lawsuit, filed in federal court by a nurse at the hospital’s former Bremerton campus, alleged that nurses’ unpaid breaks and 30 minutes for lunch are “continuously subject to interruption,” which violates Washington state labor laws and the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, the hospital system that owns St. Michael, reached a settlement on the case in late January, according to court documents filed last month. The settlement amount is undisclosed.
If you’ve recently gone to St. Michael Medical Center or tried booking a doctor’s appointment online, you may have noticed something’s changed: CHI Franciscan is out, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health is in.
Along with the merger between CHI Franciscan and Virginia Mason, which the two groups signed off on in January, came a new name for the consolidated hospital system: Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, or VMFH.
The system, which owns St. Michael hospital in Silverdale and the former facility in Bremerton that still houses an emergency room, includes 11 hospitals and nearly 300 heath sites across Western Washington.
The new name’s a bit of a mouthful, to be sure, but such is the way in the health industry, where hospital mergers and acquisitions have become the norm. Indeed, CHI Franciscan resulted from a 1996 merger between the Colorado-based Catholic Health Initiatives and Franciscan Health System based in Tacoma.