Articles Tagged: University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics

Face masks now are optional in all University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics facilities, including Iowa River Landing and QuickCare clinics, except for people who have symptoms of a respiratory virus or unvaccinated employees.

The union representing 3,800 University of Iowa Health Care workers has announced the ratification of its “strongest contract for our members in Iowa since the changes to Chapter 20 in 2017.”

I was ordered to leave the building and escorted out by Coralville police.

Mercy Iowa City Hospital in recent months had to retain a “strategic and operational performance improvement” consultant after breaching debt coverage obligations amid declining patient days and occupancy percentages. Just two miles west, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is overrun with as many as 70 people waiting in the emergency room at one time.

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.

UnityPoint Health-St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids on Thursday became the region’s most recent health care system to announce plans to open an off-campus emergency department – with its new Marion site expected to open in summer 2024. That’s just miles from a Mercy Medical Center facility also announced this week.

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.