Vanessa Miller

Wrestler Lilly Luft was inspired by her brother Logan, and the gift he left after dying.

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.

Just three years into the University of Iowa’s landmark 50-year deal for the private operation of its utility system, cracks are emerging in the $1.165 billion agreement through a lawsuit the private operator filed last week accusing UI of “breaching its obligations.”

For its 50th year this summer, RAGBRAI will head back to Coralville as one of its overnight stops on the 500-mile ride.

$300K spent on failed search could go toward another

Once again, the University of Iowa has lost a legal battle with a contractor that worked on its six-year-old Stead Family Children’s Hospital – adding millions to UI’s swelling legal tab and further ballooning its total project cost to more than $420 million.

A group of 26 Republican lawmakers wants Iowa’s public universities to explain themselves and their teacher training curriculum by defining a long list of terms plucked from course descriptions — like “compulsory heterosexuality,” “critical media literacy” and “equitable science teaching.”

More than half the nearly 6,000 University of Iowa faculty and staff who responded to a recent campus climate survey said they’ve “seriously considered leaving the university” in the last 12 months – primarily due to pay, workplace culture, or career advancement.

By the time the University of Iowa student union celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025, administrators expect the campus hub will be deep into an $81.1 million renovation that includes swapping its historic Iowa House Hotel for a new “campus well-being and mental health center.”

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.