Category: Health

When Trixie the dog travels to the University of Wisconsin Veterinary School in Madison for an evaluation prior to surgery to remove a cancerous tumor near her right eye, she’ll be wearing a pet guardian angel on her collar.

After six months of search and interviews, the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics announced its new leader Wednesday.

Donna Katen-Bahensky has been named chief executive officer of UW Hospital, replacing Donna Sollenberger, who left in September to head the Baylor Clinic and Hospital in Houston.

University Hospitals CEO Donna Katen-Bahensky is leaving to become CEO and president at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics, officials announced Wednesday.

“It’s a great place and a great hospital, and I am very excited,” Katen-Bahensky, 54, said in a phone interview with the Press-Citizen about her new job.

Iowa City, Ia. – The highest-paid administrator in Iowa government is leaving the state to become president and chief executive of the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison, officials said Wednesday.

Donna Katen-Bahensky, 54, has been chief executive officer of University of Iowa Hospitals since 2002. She was paid $465,337 in the fiscal year that ended June 30, making her the 11th-highest-paid state employee.

“Ms. Katen-Bahensky brings a genuine zeal for compassionate, patient-centered care, solid leadership, and a commitment to community service,” said Patrick Boyle, chairman of the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics Authority board.

Donna Katen-Bahensky, the chief executive officer of University Hospitals, is leaving to take the helm at another university hospital â?? not because she is unhappy at the University of Iowa but because the new opportunity was too good to pass up, she said.

“It’s hard to leave. I cried when I had to say goodbye to my managers,” Katen-Bahensky told The Gazette. “This is a great place. I love the people, and I love this hospital.”

MADISON, Wis. — Future medical professionals in the area are training with the help of human patient simulators.

At University of Wisconsin Health, students have the chance to practice on a simulator, which has a pulse and heartbeat and talks to its caretakers — EMS teams in training.

UW-Madison makes an effort to boost the number of doctors practicing in rural areas. Dean Byron Crouse with the Wisconsin Academy of Rural Medicine, or WARM, says rural areas face a looming physician shortage. Crouse created the Academy, which currently has five students. They will spend the first two years at UW Medical School learning the basics, then head to Marshfield’s Rice Lake Clinic to get a feel for the unique challenges of rural health care

MADISON, Wis. — Since the early 1980s, more than 9,800 cases of HIV have been reported in Wisconsin. Of that total, an estimated 6,200 people are still living with HIV or AIDS and more than 3,600 have died.

Saturday is World AIDS Day 2007, and the theme is “leadership.” A local woman is working to increase public awareness by asking people to look past HIV/AIDS and see the person.

In a clinic exam room, a doctor might run tests, but Heidi Nass, an HIV/AIDS patient advocate and educator at University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison, offers patients a kind of therapy that doesn’t involve needles or pills. She listens and shares.

Waukesha County was chosen as a pilot site because of its location, diversity of populations and the relatively high number of births recorded here. Other pilot sites are in California, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Utah.

Local plans for the project are being coordinated jointly by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Meanwhile, hours away at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, students may discover they are eligible for health insurance free of charge. Through University Health Services, Wisconsin’s flagship school provides students with basic health care services at no extra cost, according to the school’s Web site.

Watertown Memorial Hospital and UW Health in Madison today announced an affiliation that will link Watertown’s independnent community hospital and physician network to the extensive resources of UW Health.

Officials of the local Hospital and UW Health have been in discussions over the potential for a partnership agreement over the past 18 months, and those discussions are now moving quickly toward completion.

La Crosse County is ranked the 11th healthiest in Wisconsin in a report released today.

The annual report of county rankings by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute showed La Crosse County moved up from No. 16 in 2006 to No. 11 in 2007 among the stateâ??s 72 counties and the the city of Milwaukee.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources will work with the University of Wisconsin on ways to get the university to clean up a 48-year-old coal-fired Charter Street power plant that’s been ruled noncompliant.

Lloyd Eagan, DNR South Central Region director, said today the goal is to bring the facility back into compliance with federal clean air laws.

“We need to sit down with the UW and work through the things they’ve looked at, to see what’s practical for their situation,” Eagan said. “There’s a whole range of options to consider.”

19 year old Jesse Miller, who authorities allege placed threatening and suicidal 911 calls to spark a lockdown of UW-Hospital and portions of campus, was charged with escape and obstructing justice.

Assistant Dane County District Attorney Mike Verveer told 27 News prosecutors are waiting for additional police reports before making criminal charging decisions in connection to the September phone calls which led police to shutdown campus buildings.

The man who allegedly brought the University of Wisconsin to a near standstill with a series of threatening telephone calls in September made a brief court appearance Friday on charges of escaping a work-release jail and lying to police during a telephone call from San Diego.

Those charges against Jesse Miller, currently held in the Dane County Jail, do not address the series of threats made to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Sept. 25, in a series of phone calls. Assistant District Attorney Michael Verveer said Friday the UW Police Department has not yet turned over police reports of the incident to the District Attorney’s Office.

Cold can kill. It can even kill cancer.

Paul Spankowski of Reedsburg is very grateful for that.

“It saved my life,” said Spankowski, 56, who owns Good Earth Gardens with his wife, Martha Burton, and sells products regularly at the Farmers’ Market in Madison.

After weeks of investigation and the implementation of corrective measures, the mold problem affecting Ingraham Hall has been solved, officials said Thursday.

LATER, AFTER the bombs and all the carnage, when her country’s triumphant celebration had gone terribly wrong, what Amna Buttar would remember most were the looks on the faces of Benazir Bhutto’s teenage daughters hours earlier when they told their mother goodbye at the airport in Dubai.

….Buttar was on the plane with the former prime minister that flew from Dubai to Karachi, Pakistan last Thursday, and — for a time — in the parade that ended when a suicide bomber set off explosives that killed 134 and injured around 500.

Buttar, until recently a physician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School, had been asked by Bhutto to accompany her on her historic return to Pakistan last week after eight years in exile.

As Don Urbanek lay in a hospital bed, his pain from terminal cancer eased by medication, he expressed a wish: to visit his son’s ranch in Oklahoma before dying.
“We will do whatever we can” to make that happen, nurse practitioner Kathleen Murphy-Ende said, as a social worker stood nearby.
The delicate moment seemed typical for hospice, the medical specialty that focuses on the end of life. But Urbanek wasn’t a hospice patient. He was receiving palliative care, a related but different service provided in a new unit at UW Hospital.