Compounding escalating costs associated with the University of Iowa’s construction of its 14-story Stead Family Children’s Hospital, campus officials are asking permission to spend $45 million replacing damaged windows on nine floors – tripling the $15 million they originally planned to spend replacing cracked or delaminated windows on two floors.
After two bargaining sessions and a few proposals and counter offers, the Board of Regents preemptively canceled all upcoming meetings with the union representing more than 3,800 University of Iowa Health Care workers and “declared an impasse.”
Wrapping up a medical drama that started 12 years ago in a University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics operating room, the State Appeal Board on Monday agreed to settle a 2020 lawsuit from a former employee accusing UIHC of improperly sharing details of an incident with prospective employers.
Inflation, labor costs, and supply chain issues have upped the total cost and expanded the construction timeline for a new Steindler North Liberty Ambulatory Surgery Center planned near where the University of Iowa is building its new hospital – which also recently aired substantial cost increases.
University of Iowa Health Care’s websites were back up and running Wednesday morning after an outage Tuesday knocked them down for hours. UIHC officials haven’t answered questions about when the outage started and how long the sites were down. They also haven’t answered questions about what caused the outage and whether it was the result of a cyberattack.
University of Iowa Health Care officials confirmed Tuesday afternoon their public websites are down – including those for the UI Hospitals & Clinics, UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital, and UI Carver College of Medicine.
$300K spent on failed search could go toward another
The UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital is considering installing a NICU camera system allowing families of intensive care infants to do watch livestreams of their babies stretching and arching and blinking or just sleeping.
Typifying the gap separating the union representing thousands of University of Iowa Health Care workers and their governing Board of Regents, union representatives Wednesday opened contract negotiations with a 25-page proposal including a 14-percent raise while regents offered a 1.5- to 3-percent raise on a single page.
By 2025, University of Iowa Health Care expects to have a new primary care location up and running in southeast Iowa City – addressing a “health care access gap” in that part of town.
A Le Claire mother is suing the state, accusing University of Iowa physicians of perforating her bowel and charring her rectum during a surgical procedure – leaving her permanently impaired and unable to care for her two sons to the same degree she was pre-surgery.
“That's a whole different level of stress on an already stressful situation,” University of Iowa Dr. Christopher Hogrefe told The Gazette, pulling from personal experience as a current assistant physician for the Chicago Cubs.
Although the University of Iowa stripped orthopedics from its second application to build a new hospital in North Liberty – after critics of the first, denied application slammed its focus on orthopedics and state officials cited the heavy orthopedics bent in its rejection – UI Health Care officials now are calling the project an “orthopedic hospital.”
Given low-dose CT scans are available and capable of detecting lung cancer early, the University of Iowa’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center recently joined more than 50 top cancer organizations in urging providers and insurers to improve access to and more frequently use lung cancer screening tools for those at high risk.
“The world has changed a lot in the last two and a half years, and the ways that we're trying to protect health care workers, and society as a whole, are different, too,” said study co-principal investigator Nicholas Mohr, UI professor of emergency medicine, anesthesia and epidemiology.
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