| Nursing home suit is settled
MADISON, Wis. (AP) The state's largest nursing home for veterans paid $87,500 to settle a lawsuit claiming poor nursing care led to a patient's death in 2004.
The settlement ends a lawsuit that claimed the Wisconsin Veterans Home, which houses about 700 veterans in four separate facilities, had an untrained and inadequate nursing staff.
The home made the payment to William LaBarge's widow last month, and a judge accepted the settlement last week.
Details of the settlement came a week after President Bush ordered an investigation of military and veteran hospitals after reports of shoddy outpatient health care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
The lawsuit claimed LaBarge fell out of bed and fractured his hip in December 2003 after nurses failed to place an alarm on his bed.
Tasty vittles that make you go yum
Ask a transplanted Chicagoan what he most misses about his hometown, and nine times out of 10 the response will be cuisine-related -- Italian beef, deep dish pizza, hot dogs smothered with mustard, onions and pickle relish. The same holds true for wherever you're from. Folks who hail from Terre Haute, Ind., crave "square" doughnuts. Former central Illinois residents pick up "gondolas" before they leave town. One-time Philadelphians wax nostalgic over "Tastykakes." Before they were sold nationally, Coors beer, Krispy Kreme doughnuts and White Castle hamburgers all carried a certain mystique because they could only be had in certain parts of the country. "There's definitely a magic to have a regional presence associated with a certain area. It adds to the legend," said Mary Borneman, manager of investor and public relations for the Tasty Baking Co., which manufactures Tastykakes.
Region's hospitals proactively pursue nursing candidates to ease ...
WHITE PLAINS - Many hospitals go to nursing schools to recruit future graduates, but White Plains Hospital doesn't wait until students earn their professional degrees - recruiters start the process long before prospective nurses get their high school diploma. Once a week for the past year, as many as 20 students at White Plains High School spend their lunch hour with a nurse or some other guest speaker from the hospital to learn about nursing careers. "We want to give them an overview of what nursing is all about," said Annie Norris, a counselor at the high school who runs the Nurse Apprentice program for White Plains Hospital. The hospital started the program a year ago as a way to make a strong, early contact with students considering a career in nursing.
Long-term care insurance helps some avert financial woes
Dale Bruhn of Madison thought he was covered 20 years ago when he bought long-term care insurance - that he and his wife would be able to afford the help they needed as they got older. Bruhn purchased three years of benefits - the average amount of time that people spent in a nursing home. But Norma Bruhn bucked the average. After being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, she lived seven years at home and eight more in a nursing home before she died in 2002. When their long-term care coverage ran out, her husband was forced to turn to public assistance. .
|
