New Bloomington Hospital set to open in December
IU Health is proud to announce that the new IU Health Bloomington at the Indiana University Academic Health Center will open its doors on Sunday, December 5th. With valet parking, a LEED Silver Certified designation, and all private patient rooms—the new IU Health Bloomington is another step forward in providing great healthcare to Monroe and the surrounding counties.
The new IU Health Bloomington at the Indiana University Regional Academic Health Center “was designed not just for today, but for the next 100 years,” said IU Health South Central Region President Brian Shockney. “Our teams put a lot of research into what makes a hospital have both a healing environment while providing top-of-the-line clinical care. With 622,000 square-feet and 364 patient beds, IU Health Bloomington is actually a bit larger than our current facility,” said Shockney. “But even with the new walls, the same team is here to give expert care to our friends, family, and neighbors.”
The private rooms have been built with special material to help reduce noise from the hallways and nearby rooms. And the team has integrated an adaptive acuity model of care that brings care to the patient, thereby reducing the need to move patients around the hospital for different services.
Learn more about the new IU Health Bloomington at www.iuhealth.org/bloom-build.
Indiana AG Rokita speaks on Columbus’ accomplishments
Attorney General Todd Rokita spoke at an event in Clinton Indiana today, a community with a large Italian immigrant population, where he celebrated the contributions of Christopher Columbus, honored the heritage of the nearly 17 million Italian Americans living in the U.S., and spoke about defending American liberties, the importance of religion, a strong family unit, and how we can preserve our God given rights that are enshrined in the Constitution.
More than 500 years ago, Christopher Columbus bravely, and quite miraculously embarked on a voyage to the New World, where he was responsible for creating a new era of exploration and travels that led to the first settlements on what we now call the United States.
“For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of American students were taught about the significance of Columbus’ discovery of the New World in school, and his contributions were greatly admired,” said Attorney General Rokita. “But now left-wing radical socialists are tearing down statues of Columbus, and diminishing a hero who was greatly respected by millions of Americans.”
Last Friday, Joe Biden signed a proclamation, making October 11th Indigenous People’s Day, in a deliberate attempt to purge Columbus from our history, and forever erase his contributions from memory. “If we want to celebrate the contributions of Indigenous People—and there are many—we can do that on a different day,” Attorney General Rokita said.
It is important that we celebrate what Columbus means to America. As Ronald Reagan once said: “Columbus is justly admired as a brilliant navigator, a fearless man of action, a visionary who opened the eyes of an older world to an entirely new one. Above all, he personifies a view of the world that many see as quintessentially American: not merely optimistic, but scornful of the very notion of despair.”
CARE Consortium, managed at IU, received additional $42 million for concussion research
The world’s most comprehensive concussion study is being expanded with a boost of over $42 million in new funding, aimed at following athletes for a decade after injury—examining the impacts of head injuries after graduation. Indiana University School of Medicine serves as the administrative and operations core for the study, and is the central coordination center for the (The NCAA-U.S. Department of Defense Concussion Assessment, Research and Education (CARE) Consortium. The IU team provides regulatory and fiduciary oversight, as well as biostatistics and data management, neuroimaging, bioinformatics, biomarkers/biospecimen management, and other support resources for the group.
The CARE Consortium was created through the NCAA-Department of Defense Grant Alliance in 2014. The new funding allows for investigators to build on existing research by following former CARE research participants beyond graduation to evaluate the long-term or late effects of traumatic brain injuries for up to 10 years or more after initial exposure or injury. The most comprehensive, prospective study of its kind to better understand concussion, head impact exposure and effects on brain health, the CARE Consortium has broad goals to enhance the health and safety of NCAA student-athletes and military service members. It also is the first major concussion study to assess both women and men in 24 sports—previously, most concussion literature came from men’s football and men’s ice hockey.
Anticipated outcomes from the study include determining the prevalence and characteristics of long-term brain health problems associated with HIE and concussion and mild traumatic brain injury. The study also seeks to validate advanced biomarkers (such as neuroimaging, and blood) that detect early indicators of such long-term health issues.
This Week in Hoosier History
1930 – United States Vice President Charles Curtis was met by enthusiastic crowds as he visited seven Indiana cities all in the same day. Starting from Indianapolis, he traveled to Franklin, where he spoke at the Artcraft Theater. Moving on, he made speeches in Edinburgh, Columbus, Crothersville, Austin, and Scottsburg. At all stops, he encouraged Hoosiers to cooperate with President Herbert Hoover in his efforts in dealing with the nation’s economic problems.