Latest news with #Baystate
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Baystate Medical Center earns fifth consecutive Magnet Recognition for nursing excellence
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) – Baystate Medical Center has once again earned Magnet Recognition from the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). This marks the fifth consecutive designation and placing it among an elite group of hospitals nationwide. The announcement highlights Baystate's two decades of sustained excellence in nursing, as it becomes one of fewer than one percent of hospitals across the country to achieve Magnet status five times in a row. The designation is considered the highest national honor for professional nursing practice and is recognized as the gold standard for nursing excellence. Chicopee small business recognized at Walmart showcase 'This recognition affirms what we already know to be true—our nurses are extraordinary,' said Joanne Miller, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, Senior Vice President and Chief Nurse Executive of Baystate Health. 'This fifth Magnet designation is a profound recognition of the extraordinary care, professionalism, and heart that our nurses bring to every patient, every day. It reflects 20 years of sustained nursing excellence and a deep-rooted culture of collaboration across our organization. I could not be prouder of the nursing team and every individual who supports their success.' Magnet designation is awarded based on a rigorous evaluation process that includes a review of patient outcomes, nursing leadership, professional development, and collaboration within healthcare teams. The ANCC cited Baystate for exemplary performance in these areas and praised its culture of innovation and continuous improvement. 'This honor is a reflection of our entire Baystate Medical Center family—all team members who work with and support our nurses,' said Ron Bryant, President & COO of Baystate Medical Center. 'It speaks to our collective commitment to excellence and the power of working together to care for our community. Congratulations to our nurses on this achievement!' Baystate first received a Magnet design in 2005 and has maintained its commitment to excellence in patient-centered care ever since. Hospital leaders attribute this sustained recognition to the dedication and teamwork among nurses and their interdisciplinary partners. Throughout its 20-year journey as a Magnet-recognized institution, Baystate has consistently prioritized professional development, shared decision-making, and resiliency, key principles of Magnet organizations. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Baystate CEO Peter Banko faces plagiarism accusations over company blog posts
SPRINGFIELD — Peter Banko, Baystate Health's president and CEO, has been accused of plagiarizing other writers in a number of internal blog posts. 'We are aware of a complaint to our compliance hotline in January and May and it is being managed as an internal compliance matter,' said Heather Duggan, a spokesperson for the hospital. 'The Baystate Health Board of Trustees has discussed and addressed it with our President & CEO.' When asked Thursday how the board addressed it, and if Banko was available to speak about it, Duggan declined to comment. A review of internal blog posts obtained by The Republican shows that items appearing under Banko's name contain sections that are identical or very similar to other previously published materials, from sources including Wikipedia, NPR and Harvard Business School's blog. The original authors are not credited. The allegations were first reported Thursday morning by The Boston Globe. 'This is not a one-off mistake, this is a pattern of behavior,' said a Baystate Health employee who submitted a complaint to the hospital system. The person did not want to be named for fear it would impact their employment. Banko writes in a January 2025 post about five Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speeches one should know — the same topic of an NPR article published almost a year earlier. Not only is Banko's list of speeches the same as the NPR story, but multiple paragraphs in his post are nearly identical to sections of the NPR article. Jonathan Eig, author of a biography on King, is quoted in the NPR story commenting on King's 'I've Been to the Mountaintop!' speech that he delivered in 1968. 'The speech really does feel a bit like his own eulogy,' Eig told NPR. 'He's talking about earthly salvation and heavenly salvation. And, in the end, boldly equating himself with Moses, who doesn't live to see the Promised Land.' Banko's post includes nearly the same quote, but he writes it as his own words. 'The speech does feel a bit like his own eulogy. He talks about earthly salvation and heavenly salvation. And, in the end, boldly equating himself with Moses, who doesn't live to see the Promised Land.' The same post by Banko contains several other sentences and phrases that are nearly the same as those from another expert source NPR interviewed about an MLK speech. The blog posts by Banko are for employees and meant to be 'digestible, informative, and inspirational,' Duggan said. 'Metaphors, analogies, pop culture trends and other ideas are referenced to make the content relatable and tangible to the work we are doing right here in Western Massachusetts,' she said of the posts. Banko has been president and CEO of Baystate since June 2024. He was previously CEO of Centura Health, in Centennial, Colorado, and took the job at Baystate replacing now-retired Dr. Mark Keroack. In another post, 'Over a Bowl of Gumbo,' Banko writes about Leah Chase, known as the 'Queen of Creole Cuisine.' One paragraph in his post is, aside from the omission of a phrase, just a few words different from a passage in a Wikipedia article about Chase. In a post entitled 'I want the Truth!' Banko writes about lying. 'When I was growing up, one of the principles in my parent's house was that we had to tell the truth, no matter how painful it might be. Lying wasn't something you could get away with (although my sister and I tried). Like Pinocchio's nose, it would be apparent to others.' He later wrote: 'However as we get older, the truth becomes more nuanced — and there are times when a little white lie or the absence of some key facts might be appropriate. The problem is that all of us have different standards for when, why, and how we shade the truth." Those paragraphs are nearly identical to a 2013 blog post from entitled 'Why Organizational Truth Has Many Shades of Gray.' To the employee who reported the suspected plagiarism to the hospital, it wasn't a gray area. 'It violates the legal, ethical, and professional standards that he himself laid out in our code of conduct,' they wrote in the complaint, which they shared with The Republican. 'Simply put, it is terrible leadership. Baystate employees and our patients deserve so much better than this.' The employee said they were reading a post from late April called 'All apologies,' in which Banko talks about a letter an Apple CEO wrote in 2007. Banko's post reads: 'On September 6, 2007, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to 'all iPhone customers' that was published on Apple's website. It's no longer available there, but I am sure you can find it through a Google search.' The employee did their own Google search and found a 2022 opinion article on It reads: " ... on September 6, 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to 'all iPhone customers,' that was published on Apple's website. (It's no longer available there, but you can read the entire thing via a copy on the internet archive.)" The story says of the letter: 'the entire thing is a masterclass in admitting when you're wrong.' Banko writes that: 'The entire thing is a masterclass in admitting when you are wrong.' Read the original article on MassLive.
Boston Globe
15-05-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Baystate Health CEO accused of plagiarism amid company's financial struggles
The company posts in question appeared from July 1 of last year through as recently as May 12. Advertisement One post described growing up in a home where lying was unacceptable, and featured sentences almost identical to those in a 2013 article in Forbes. Another recounted seeing the movie 'Conclave' to escape the toxic politics around the US election. It repeated phrases verbatim from a November article in a Pennsylvania newspaper. The pattern was the subject of an anonymous complaint filed on May 4 with Baystate's compliance department by an employee who accused Banko of plagiarism. Banko declined to be interviewed by the Globe about his blog. 'He's pretty much flat out until the end of time,' Baystate spokesperson Heather Duggan said. In response to the Globe's queries, the company issued a statement that didn't mention plagiarism but said 'metaphors, analogies, pop culture trends and other ideas are referenced [in Banko's blog] to make the content relatable and tangible.' Advertisement 'We are aware of the complaint to our compliance hotline, and the Baystate Health Board of Trustees has discussed and addressed the matter with our President & CEO,' the statement said, without elaborating. An internal memo sent to Baystate executives on Wednesday and obtained by the Globe said, 'We understand that the compliance concern is specifically in reference to the lack of citing, attributing and sourcing information on numerous internal blog posts.' Phone messages left with at least 10 members of the board of trustees went unreturned. Baystate, a not-for-profit system with an annual budget of about $3 billion, has struggled financially in recent years, a topic Banko discussed with the The complaint by the anonymous employee said Banko had violated the code of conduct adopted by Baystate in July 2024 after Banko became head of the system. The code, which is available on the internal network and displays Banko's signature, says employees must maintain 'the highest ethical standards' and can be disciplined if they fail to report misconduct. The employee shared his complaint with the Globe, which is not identifying him to protect his anonymity. Banko's actions, he wrote in the complaint, violate 'the legal, ethical, and professional standards that he himself laid out in our code of conduct. Simply put, it is terrible leadership.' The employee told the Globe he grew suspicious that Banko might be copying other writers, so he Googled distinctive language in the blog and found the original sources. He said he was outraged by the 'hypocrisy of [Banko] preaching to us in the blogs about truth.' Advertisement Banko is not the first high-ranking hospital executive in New England to be accused of plagiarism. In 2019, Seleem Choudhury, the president and chief operating officer of Porter Medical Center in Middlebury, Vt., resigned soon after he was found to have plagiarized passages in weekly emails to staff, Plagiarism is widely agreed to be unethical, but it also signals 'terrible' judgment when it can be detected so easily, said Alan Sager, a professor of health law, policy, and management at the Boston University School of Public Health. 'And if a person makes terrible judgments about matters separate from the core of their work, how can they be trusted to make good judgments and behave ethically in matters at the core of their work?' Sager said. In a post called 'I Want the Truth!' in October, Banko wrote that he grew up in a house where one of the guiding principles was 'we had to tell the truth, no matter how painful it might be. Lying wasn't something you could get away with (although my sister and I tried). Like Pinocchio's nose, it would be apparent to others.' In 2013, a Advertisement In another post called 'Happy New Year,' Banko wrote that he and his wife had gone to a theater to see 'Conclave,' the movie about Vatican politics, shortly before Election Day. He had hoped, he wrote, 'to break away from the horse race politics and the hyperpolarized rhetoric. ... Little did I know the movie would provide me with valuable insight into the very thing I was trying to escape.' A few weeks earlier, the published an article by a guest columnist who wrote this about the same film: 'Just days before Election Day, I chose to go see a movie in a theater as a way to break away from the horse race politics and hyperpolarized rhetoric. Little did I know the movie would provide me with valuable insight into the very thing I was trying to escape.' Paul Levy, chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center from 2002 to 2011, wrote a daily public blog about health care during his last five years at the medical center and for more than four years after he left. As Levy heard a description of Banko's blog passages during a telephone interview, he groaned loudly. 'No, no, no,' said Levy, who wrote more than 4,000 blog posts and now works as a business consultant. 'It's just fundamentally so unnecessary to do that, because it's quite easy to put something on your blog and attribute it to somebody else, and in so doing, you're lessening none of the impact.' Banko was appointed Baystate's Advertisement Banko had most recently served as president and chief executive of Centura Health, in Centennial, Colo., which was part of the national system CommonSpirit Health. He has a bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master's degree in health administration from Cornell University. The controversy arises as Baystate grapples with upheaval and financial problems. The health system, whose largest hospital, Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, has 716 beds and is a teaching site of the UMass Chan Medical School, lost $61 million in 2024, $63 million in 2023, and $177 million in 2022. Baystate has made three rounds of job cuts since November, most recently Baystate serves more than 800,000 people throughout western New England and has roots dating to the founding of Springfield Hospital in 1883, according to the company's website. The health system has more than 1,000 beds across four hospitals in Springfield, Greenfield, Westfield, and Palmer. It handles 196,000 visits to its emergency rooms a year. The hospitals deliver more than 4,800 babies annually. Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Meet Dr. Amanda Whitehouse, medicine's gift to Mason Square in Springfield
SPRINGFIELD – Baystate Health's Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center serves people in an asthma capital where poor access to fresh foods and chronic stress exacerbate common ailments. So volunteers start community gardens. They work to improve education. 'The solutions live in this community,' said Dr. Amanda Whitehouse. 'My job is to keep those people healthy.' Baystate Health oversees medical offices in Mason Square that bring convenient care to a historically underserved Black community. Whitehouse will soon join that cause. On a recent morning, the health center was busy, but not overwhelmed, with patients in waiting room chairs filling out forms. There were meetings and consultations. Whitehouse, 33, who calls herself a 'Springfield convert,' is part of the inaugural 2017 class of University of Massachusetts T. H. Chan School of Medicine students who took classroom and lab training in Worcester, but got their first taste of talking with people at Baystate Health in Springfield. That's a needed change of pace from the lab, the library and the lecture hall. 'They mean it to say to you 'This is why you are doing this. This is why you want to be a doctor,'' she said. What she learned was the importance of context. 'It doesn't help for me tell people they should eat more fresh vegetables,' she said. 'If they live in a food desert and can't get them.' But it does help if she knows that white rice is a big part of a patient's traditional diet. Would they consider switching to brown rice, or to a rice made of cauliflower?' Even the study of dermatology needs to adjust. Common rashes look different on darker skin compared with textbooks photos of white people. Whitehouse has about two months left as a medicine-pediatrics resident at Baystate Health. In September, she'll return to Baystate's Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center and start her career as a primary care physician. By practicing in Springfield she'll help address a chronic shortage of primary care physicians. She'll also fulfill one of the goals of the medical school program that brought her to Springfield: to help address the physician shortage by expanding the supply of doctors here. A study released three months ago by the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission found that although the state has the highest total physicians per capita, it has the fifth-lowest share of all physicians who work in primary care and few new physicians are going into that area of practice. The share of primary care physicians in direct patient care as a share of total physicians declined between 2014 and 2020 from 26.7% to 24.7%. The share of specialty physicians increased from 69% to 70.7%. Forty-one percent of respondents told the Massachusetts Center for Health Information Analysis in 2023 they had difficulty accessing care, with the most-cited reason being inability to get an appointment. Whitehouse said that when she returns to work as a doctor, she can expect to care for about 1,000 patients. 'This work is not easy,' she said. Whitehouse said she knows of fellow doctors — 'people fully enmeshed in the health care system' — who also have trouble getting appointments. Whitehouse worked with the Baystate Springfield Educational Partnership, getting high schoolers interested in health care. Whitehouse's medical school program, known as Population-based Urban and Rural Community Health, enrolls 25 to 30 students each year. 'Some of us stayed,' Whitehouse said. 'More of us should stay.' But there are factors that make it difficult to recruit, and to keep, primary care doctors. Some are drawn into fellowships where they get more training for lucrative specialties. Some are drawn to big cities. 'That's the thing with residents, sometimes,' she said, referring to doctors starting out. 'Everyone comes together and then goes back to where they are from.' She grew up in Braintree and earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan. Whitehouse said she likes the region's lifestyle options. She lives in West Springfield and enjoys the outdoors and hiking with her dog. The combined medicine-pediatrics program means she'll treat both adults and children, with an emphasis on children. The only people who fall outside her scope as a primary care doctor are patients who are pregnant. 'I tell them to bring their baby back to see me,' Whitehouse said. For neighborhoods in and around Mason Square, the doctoring that Whitehouse brings will build upon health solutions in place, including Gardening in the Community. That project not only grows fruits and vegetables, but has a youth training program that teaches young people how to raise produce. The organization runs a farm store just a few blocks away at 200 Walnut St. Fifty or so people participate each week in a maternal health program – with advice on getting through postpartum and on building strength through exercise or senior fitness chair aerobics at the Bay Area Neighborhood Council, said president Gwendolyn Smith. 'It means a lot,' Smith said. Jaju Pierogi takes Polish taste of Feeding Hills, Wilbraham, to TV's 'Shark Tank' Fatal fire in Pelham under investigation Judge dismisses transplant doctor's suit against Baystate Read the original article on MassLive. Read the original article on MassLive.
