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Nurses at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center have reached a tentative contract with management, averting a strike that was scheduled to begin next week.

The approximately 1,300 registered nurses at the two Manhattan hospitals are slated to vote on the four-year contract on Jan. 4.

In a memorandum to staff Stanley Brezenoff, CEO and president of Continuum Health Partners, the parent company, said the new contract “contains most of the parameters outlined” in a memo sent on Friday.

That memo referred to an offer that included “modest premiums” for health benefits—a sticking point in negotiations, as nurses currently pay no premiums—and an increased use of generic drugs. The offer included “generous lump sum payments” for this year and each of the next two years and wage increases between 2% and 2.5% per year in each of the next three years.

Doug

CDIstafing.com

British scientists have developed an experimental malaria vaccine that may have the potential to neutralize all strains of the most deadly species of malaria parasite.

Results from very early tests of the vaccine in mice and rabbits show it induces an antibody response able to halt many strains of the P. falciparum parasite, the form that causes almost all of the 655,000 malaria deaths worldwide each year.

Nationwide, the number of registered nurses ages 23 to 26 grew from 102,000 in 2002 to 165,000 in 2009, according to the study. The current cohort of young nurses is expected to be the largest ever, the study said.

If the trend continues, there may be enough nurses by 2030 to meet the projected needs of aging baby boomers and the expansion of the healthcare system, researchers said.

In the new study, just published in The Lancet, a group of researchers led by Robert Bolli grew stem cells from patients’ own hearts, after the patients had suffered serious heart attacks, leaving their hearts permanently damaged. They measured the patients’ heart function by how much blood was being pumped through the left ventricle. The patients had an average LVEF of 30.3% at the beginning of the study, an indication of very severe heart disease. Four months later, the 16 patients who received the stem cells had an average LVEF of 38.5%, while patients in the control group showed no change. Even more dramatically, after one year the patients LVEF had improved further, to 42.5%.

Thus, remarkably, the cardiac stem cells seem to have “taken” in these patients, growing back into healthy cardiac cells in these severely ill patients.

 Doug

CDIstaffing.com