Health

Say you're a Midwestern farmer in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery or a major illness. It's time for the nurse's check-in, but there's no knock on the door.

At Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, a camera attached to the wall over the foot of the bed whirls around, as a video monitor next to the camera lights up to show a smiling face with a headset on.

"Good afternoon, this is Jeff with SafeWatch," the smiling face says. "Just doing my afternoon rounds."

The new tower at Cox South is being occupied this week.  Wednesday, healthcare workers moved patients in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) to their new unit.Each baby required a team of experts as they were transported down hallways to their new rooms.

The new NICU features 28 beds each in private rooms with a twin pull-out bed for parents to spend the night.

The ten-story west tower at Cox South houses the Dee Ann White Women's and Children's Hospital and the Jared Neurosciences Center.  The 343,000 square foot facility cost $130 million.

McDonald County, Missouri, is home to many immigrant groups that have moved into the county in the last twenty years. These groups include Hispanic, Somali, Burmese, Sudanese and numerous others. And while these groups do not overlap culturally, they do share one thing - language acts as a barrier to access when it comes to their health.

Lucia Sebastian is the Language Assistant at the Head Start in Noel, Missouri. She works with the numerous immigrant children who have limited English skills and need help to communicate.

She has a four-year old daughter enrolled at Head Start, but she recounted an incident where Head Start was instrumental in helping her older son, Victor.

When her son was eleven years old, he was playing baseball with a friend in the yard and got hit in the mouth with the bat. The blow knocked out several teeth, but Sebastian was unsure she could afford the costs of taking Victor to the hospital.

The new ten-story west tower at Cox South houses the Dee Ann White Women's and Children's Hospital and the Jared Neurosciences Center.  The public got a chance to tour the 343,000 square-foot, $130 million addition during an open house celebration Saturday.  The ground floor is home to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), which features 28 beds each in a private room with space for a parent to spend the night.  Parents also have a private lounge with a kitchen, free Wi-Fi, TV, shower and more.

More than 100 Mercy Springfield employees are without jobs.   Mercy has eliminated 347 positions system wide—127 are in Springfield.

Leader positions make up 178 of the total jobs affected, according to Mercy.  It says the majority of non-leader positions are “non-clinical care roles that are part of Mercy’s revenue management department.”

In a statement from Mercy, the healthcare system says the positions eliminated in Springfield are in a variety of departments and services.

Springfield will soon be the home of a University of Missouri Clinical Campus and expanded healthcare programs at Missouri State University.

The programs are part of an effort to relieve the statewide shortage of healthcare workers. Each had experienced delays in funding, but improvements in the budget and progress at the legislative level this year are moving the programs forward. Those accomplishments were celebrated in a press conference Tuesday morning.

Chris Smiley spent most of Tuesday moving the last of the boxes out of Sac Osage Hospital in rural Osceola, MO. In the months after the small town’s only hospital closed for good, the facility’s CEO has been selling off supplies and making arrangements to transition her patients’ care to other places. The building itself is set to be demolished.

“We arranged to have another facility take over our clinic,” Smiley said. “There will be ambulance service in the community. There’s a heli-pad that will be maintained by the ambulance bay.”

CoxHealth

is looking for new employees.  The new addition to Cox Medical Center South will open this summer.  And, as part of the preparation for opening, the hospital is looking to fill about 75 full time and part time positions.

A hiring event for full and part time positions in environmental services, patient safety, and dietary will be held today (3/16) from 9 am to noon and Friday March 20th from 1 to 4 in Foster Auditorium at Cox South.

A growing number of births in the United States are happening outside of hospitals, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services reported two percent of births in Missouri took place in homes, birth centers, and in family practices in 2013. The number of out-of-hospital births has been on the rise since 2006 in Missouri because it’s becoming an attractive alternative for some families.

Third year clinical students from the University of Missouri School of Medicine will be able to observe doctors in Springfield as early as 2016 if funding comes to fruition.

The long-awaited program hit a roadblock last year, after Gov. Jay Nixon withheld the program’s $10 million appropriation as part of an even larger withhold.

This month’s national settlement with credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s equals $21.5 million for Missouri, a portion of which will benefit two major projects in Springfield.

Missouri State University President Clif Smart announced this week that Gov. Jay Nixon has released $620,000 of the $1.325 million withheld for the school’s occupational therapy program and health programs in West Plains.