Claire Jarvis at UnDark writes—Aging Hospitals Aren’t Ready for the Technology Revolution:
[...] American hospitals are old. Much of today’s hospital stock was initially built in the decades following World War II, when the 1946 Hill-Burton Act spurred national investment in health care. By the time the program was folded into the larger Public Health Service Act in the 1970s, it subsidized the construction of as much as a third of the nation’s hospital bed capacity. By 1997, nearly 7,000 health care facilities — including hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and clinics — had been constructed with some funding from either the Hill-Burton program or its successor in the Public Health Service Act. Sure, those buildings have been upgraded since their construction, but increasingly, the pace of renovations and repairs is faltering. [...]
What’s going on? [Health care spending consultant Don] King attributes part of the aging process to a “break-fix” mindset: Instead of conducting preventative maintenance, hospital administrators wait until infrastructure has broken before they repair it. Often, administrators have to choose between long-term facility improvement projects and short-term initiatives that yield visible results quickly. But “the average lifespan of a hospital executive is shorter than the average lifespan of a hospital building,” said David Allison, a specialist in hospital design at Clemson University, noting that many of today’s hospitals may still be around 50 to 100 years from now. It can be difficult for anyone to prioritize so far into the future. [...]
The heightened risk of equipment breakdown isn’t the only downside of aging hospitals. The facilities have subtler ways of causing trouble, even when they work according to design. That’s because many of the principles of health care that were baked into the design of Hill-Burton era hospitals are now outdated. For instance, architects of that era did not know that access to natural light aided patient recovery, and they had no idea that it would one day be commonplace for families to camp out in hospital rooms to show support for their loved ones.
Most of all, however, the architects of mid-20th century hospitals couldn’t have anticipated today’s medical technology. Modern hospitals are packed with complicated, electricity-guzzling machines, connected by mazes of wires and cables. Newer hospitals are built with large gaps between floors to accommodate these cables; older hospital buildings don’t have such space. [...]
This fundamental concern about the state of our hospitals has prompted U.S. representatives Eliot Engel and Peter King to introduce the 21st Century Hospitals Act, a bipartisan bill that would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a national study of all hospital infrastructure. Such a study would produce more information than age of plant numbers can provide — and quantifying the problem is the first step towards fixing it. The bill was introduced in June 2019, but it has yet to be considered by a committee and remains a long way from being debated on the House floor.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES • THE WEEK’S HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems.” ~~Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (2010)
TWEET OF THE DAY
[I don’t have time to write the book needed to dissect everything that’s wrong in that spew of fumes from Divine Right Donald’s mouth, but here’s one example: Hardly any wind turbines built in the United States? In 2019, 23,300 employed in 162 businesses in the industry, which had revenue so far this year of $10 billion—MB.]
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—In defense of Sen. Murray:
Boy, stung from a real scandal, the GOP is now trying to manufacture one on the Democratic side.
So here's the deal:
Sen. Patty Murray intended to be provocative when she told a group of high school students terrorist leader Osama bin Laden is popular in poor countries because he helped pay for schools, roads and even day care centers.
"We haven't done that," Murray said. "How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?”
Got it? She said: the US would be more popular overseas if we built schools, rather than bomb. Osama builds schools (which he does). Therefore, Osama is more popular.
This is outrageous? So Drudge and all the jokers of the Mighty Wullitzer are making Murray out to be some kind of enemy sympathizer. Even better, they are asking her to resign. This even as known segregationists Lott and Ashcroft remain in public service