Current News

Vermont Business Magazine Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind) at 1:30 pm ET on Thursday, February 9th will hold a press conference with rail workers to demand companies provide them with at least seven paid sick days. Sanders will be joined by representatives from SMART-TD, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes, the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department, and the National Association of Chemical Distributors.

Vermont Business Magazine Green Mountain Power (GMP) is among the top utilities in the country for grid transformation work, earning a spot on the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) 2023 Utility Transformation Leaderboard in recognition of its progress toward a modern, carbon-free electricity sector. GMP supplies Vermont with power that is 100% carbon free and 78% renewable on an annual basis and is committed to having a 100% renewable energy supply by 2030. The work focused on strengthening the grid is key for encouraging more local renewable generation and energy storage to help communities stay connected even when severe weather hits. GMP’s grid transformation work drives down costs for all customers while boosting resiliency for Vermonters.

Vermont Business Magazine Southwestern Vermont Health Care (SVHC) has implemented a new Zero Tolerance Policy for its hospital campus, medical office building and offsite practices. The policy and communications plan is a proactive approach detailing what actions and language are not tolerated to address the workplace violence trend currently occurring at healthcare institutions across the United States. The American Hospital Association (AHA) reports that 44% of nurses report an increase in incidence of physical violence in the workplace since the pandemic and 68% report an increase in verbal abuse.

Vermont Business Magazine Most American adults aren’t exactly the picture of health, with six in 10 Americans reporting at least one chronic disease, according to the CDC. Four in 10 adults have two or more chronic diseases. Some parts of the country have even worse numbers, partly because of unhealthy lifestyles and substance abuse. Vermont ranked 13th overall and finished very high in the Lifestyle category, but lower in the Disease Prevalence metric and very poorly for Substance Abuse. To find the most and least healthy states, Forbes Advisor gathered data for 21 metrics from the Kaiser Family Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Vermont Business Magazine For the fifteenth consecutive year, on Friday, February 10, the Castleton Women’s Ice Hockey Team will trade their traditional Spartan green apparel for newly designed, limited edition pink jerseys to raise awareness and funds for the Foley Cancer Center at Rutland Regional Medical Center. The 15th annual Pink the Rink will pair the Spartans with Johnson and Wales University in an exciting match-up scheduled to begin at 6pm at the Spartan Arena. Joining the festivities this year will be Boston Bruins national anthem singer Todd Angilly, a native of Warwick, Rhode Island, who has been the Bruins' primary anthem singer since 2019.

Vermont Business Magazine Gifford Health Care’s Menig Nursing Home in Randolph Center has an overall Five-Star rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), according to the latest reports published by the federal agency. The five-star system is a metric-based quality initiative that was launched in 2012. It evaluates three areas of service including health inspection outcomes, quality measures and staffing. According to CMS, the rating was created, “to help consumers, their families, and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily and to help identify areas about which [they] may want to ask questions.” The Menig Nursing Home consistently receives high ratings with the most recent five-star rating in February 2022.

Vermont Business Magazine Caregivers for those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, related dementia, Parkinson’s disease; those who are undiagnosed and show signs of early dementia and those who have recently lost someone to Alzheimer’s were among the dozen caregivers who attended Community Health’s first meeting of the Alzheimer’s caregivers support group.

Vermont Business Magazine The “doctor is in” starting Thursday, February 2nd, 2023, in the Vermont Statehouse Cafeteria from 11:30-1:30. As part of the Doctor of the Month program the Vermont Academy of Family Physicians (VTAFP) invites legislators to come meet with family physicians, to ask questions about healthcare, and to have a conversation about the practice of medicine in Vermont. The "Doctor of the Month" program is designed to bring family physicians to the Statehouse each month of the session to promote primary care, offer lawmakers a space to ask healthcare questions that are in front of them and to explain how proposed health care policies could affect the work on the ground.

Vermont Business Magazine Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE) has announced that for the second year in a row it has been named a 2022 Human Experience Guardian of Excellence Award winner by Press Ganey. PPNNE partners with Press Ganey to measure patient satisfaction through after-visit surveys. Annually, Press Ganey ranks the top hospitals and health systems across the country and recognized PPNNE for their outstanding performance in the category of patient experience. As a winner of the Press Ganey Human Experience Guardian of Excellence Award, PPNNE is in the top 5 percent for patient experience out of more than 41,000 health care facilities that Press Ganey evaluates. PPNNE is the only Planned Parenthood affiliate across the country to be recognized in this category and is just one of three health care providers of any kind to be recognized from Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont.