Vanessa Miller

Over a budget year in which Mercy Iowa City sought a new managing partner, entertained a takeover offer from University of Iowa Health Care, and tried to climb back from tens of millions in pandemic-incurred losses, new documents made public last week show finances for the Iowa City-based hospital only worsened.

Adding to the growing list of construction and renovation projects University of Iowa Health Care is pursuing in and around its campus, UIHC now is asking an outside development team to design, plan and build it a new primary care medical office building in Iowa City. Competing hospitals are concerned, saying primary care needs in the area are already well-served.

Construction of a new University of Iowa inpatient tower on its main hospitals and clinics campus — first unveiled in January as part of a 10-year master plan — is expected to start just two years from now in 2025.

With Thanksgiving 2022 in the rearview mirror, the City of Cedar Rapids — with help from Coonrod Wrecker Service — before 8 a.m. Monday arrived at the Condons to cut its soon-to-be Christmas spruce and take it to Greene Square, where crews were waiting to set it and decorate it.

The project – a collaboration of Corridor Community Action Network, The LENA Project, Iowa City-based social justice advocate Anne Ventullo and others, with financial backing from Velvet Lotus Tattoo –is in the process of collecting toy donations to stock several distribution sites across the community this season.

One in five of those ISU students screened in fall 2021 were in “serious psychological distress,” and more than half were experiencing loneliness, according to the ISU version of the National College Health Assessment.

Speaking a different language in a health care setting can not only prevent patients from communicating aches and pains or doctors from relaying important medical news or instructions – it can keep people from seeking care altogether.

The adage never to talk religion or politics with family and friends — especially over dinner or the holidays — is getting harder to follow these days given those off-limits subjects increasingly are bleeding into topics historically deemed safer, like the cost of the turkey, the weather, or even Taylor Swift.

The athletic departments across Iowa’s public universities have spent more than a combined $7.3 million taking COVID-19 tests and other pandemic-related precautions and measures – expenses covered by their main campuses, athletics revenue or federal aid.

The University of Iowa is seeking help hiring temporary workers for its State Hygienic Lab that – like many other industries – is facing a labor shortage stretching its staff thin as it aims to process an average of 1,000 tests a day for things like COVID-19, newborn and maternal screenings, and tuberculosis.

After shedding students annually for more than a decade – a post-recession trend aggravated by the pandemic – Iowa’s 15 community colleges this fall recorded their first collective enrollment uptick since 2010: a half percentage point bump, pushing the student tally to 82,251.

Spelling out its contention with a $12.8 million jury verdict awarded to a contractor on its Stead Family Children’s Hospital, the state – on behalf of the University of Iowa and Board of Regents – is accusing jurors of leveling “excessive” damages and of being “influenced by passion or prejudice.”

Meanwhile, contractor Modern Piping the day after its favorable verdict Oct. 27 asked the court to require the state, UI and regents to pay an additional $16 million related to bond issues and questions that arose at the start of the disagreement in April 2016.

Going back to fiscal 2018, University of Iowa Student Health psychiatry visits are up 40 percent, even though total enrollment is down 8 percent over the same period.

Reported crimes tied to social interaction jumped at the University of Iowa last year, with rape reports surging to 64 in 2021 from 38 in 2020, 50 in 2019, and 22 in 2015.