Cities and hospitals
[FONT=verdana, geneva, arial, sans serif]Mayo with everything[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif]Feb 21st 2008 | CLEVELAND [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif]From The Economist print edition[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif]What happens when a clinic takes over a metropolis? [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif]VISIT Rochester, Minnesota on an average winter morning and the frozen streets are virtually empty. But inside the Mayo Clinic's lovely Gonda building, designed by Cesar Pelli, the city throbs with life. The hospital's lobby is filled with patients and visitors. At noon, underground walkways teem with nurses and doctors buying lunch. In the evening fleets of buses take them home. Visitors retreat to nearby hotels and restaurants, built around Mayo especially for its guests. [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif]All this is an extreme example of a growing phenomenon. After the 20th-century factory town, such as Flint, Michigan, comes the 21st-century hospital town. Rural hospitals are often the main employers in their communities. Even Flint is trying to re-position itself as a medical hub. But a select few cities have entered the era of the mega-hospital. The most dramatic are Rochester, a medium-sized city where Mayo has long been a star business, and Cleveland, Ohio, a rustbelt city that has seen its hospitals boom and one, the Cleveland Clinic, become a new economic force. Each hospital is a behemoth: Mayo's revenues in 2006 totalled $6.3 billion, Cleveland's $4.4 billion.[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif]Their success stems from medical innovations and excellent care. The Cleveland Clinic is America's best heart hospital; Mayo tops the rankings for neurology, digestive disorders and endocrinology. Cleveland and Mayo have also expanded through mergers with other hospitals to form regional health systems. Cleveland's system includes nine community hospitals and three affiliates in Ohio. Mayo's system extends into Wisconsin and Iowa. Ambitious investment has helped them grow, too. When two gleaming new buildings are completed in Cleveland, the clinic will cover about 12m square feet (1.1m square metres), almost twice the size of the Pentagon. Mayo's Rochester campus is bigger still, at 15m square feet. [/FONT]
[FONT=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif]With this growth has come a steady increase in staff. Cleveland's 37,350 employees make it Ohio's second-largest private employer, after Wal-Mart. Mayo is Minnesota's biggest private employer, with a staff of more than 30,000 in Rochester and several thousand more who work for the regional health system. "One thing to note", says the Cleveland Clinic's chief executive, Delos Cosgrove, "is that health-care jobs are good jobs." [/FONT][FONT=verdana,geneva,arial,sans serif]Another thing worth noting is that neither the Cleveland Clinic nor Mayo has been touched by the national push to unionise nurses.[/FONT]
cont'd...
