The MHA Annual Membership Meeting is June 12-13 at the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore. Learn the the 7 reasons you should attend.

In the weeks before National Hospital Week, which begins today, MHA asked Marylanders to share how the care you and your hospitals deliver every day has made their life better.

Forensic nurse examiners care for patients who are survivors of violence. They improve the health of their communities by building partnerships and strengthening violence prevention and awareness.

The 2023 legislative session successfully concluded Monday with numerous wins for hospitals and health care in our state. Early advocacy, outreach, and education to and with lawmakers ensured all the hospital field priority bills to strengthen the hospital workforce passed overwhelmingly. That includes legislation to reform Maryland’s Board of Nursing, modernize physician credentialing, and invest in loan repayment.

Maryland’s behavioral health system of care is broken. This has been the case for some time and primarily affects your emergency departments, which are often the first point of contact or the facility of last resort for those in behavioral health crisis. (More on this in MHA’s new behavioral health one pager).

The most recent KaufmanHall National Hospital Flash Report points to persistent and ongoing financial challenges for hospitals. The report reflects what you are seeing in your own organizations—specifically double-digit wage increases to curb reliance on contract labor, sharp upticks in supplies and drugs, and increased costs to ensure physician access.

Your hospitals, like others nationwide, unfortunately are now accustomed to operating under extreme staffing shortages. Once-in-a-lifetime challenges have strained your workforce, but for the most part remain hidden from your patients.

The average wait time in a Maryland hospital emergency department—roughly 3.5 hours by one measure—has been in the spotlight, both in Annapolis and in the media. For a state considered a national leader in EMS and trauma care, our ED wait times have consistently been among the longest in the nation. Some of the causes are known, and some we are still uncovering.

With just two weeks until the General Assembly crossover deadline, MHA’s advocacy team and your government affairs leads have partnered together to make considerable progress on the field’s top priority—growing the health care workforce.

On Friday morning, Maryland Secretary of Health Laura Herrera Scott, M.D., visited the MHA offices to speak with and hear directly from hospital leaders. Secretary Herrera Scott shared that during her first 30 days she has begun a deep dive into the available data and an assessment of staffing, partnerships, and processes. She praised hospitals for their role as “an incredible partner in the state’s care delivery system.”

Today MHA is launching a new MHA Managing Patient Bias and Requests for Provider Concordance and Reassignment Toolkit. Developed with Erika McMullen, founder and CEO of Moxie Consulting Group and Dr. Nicole Rochester, founder and CEO of Your GPS Doc, the toolkit will help your teams navigate patient requests for provider concordance and reassignment and support colleagues that are facing bias—based on race, sex, religion, age, and more—from their patients.

Maryland’s unique financing system, the Total Cost of Care Model, acted as a shock absorber to the early effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, hospitals are not protected from events that have led to a “perfect storm” of financial challenges—record inflation for supplies, drugs, and equipment, as well as overwhelming labor costs. As a result, Maryland hospitals’ median operating margin was negative for 12 of the last 14 months. The latest monthly median margin was negative 1.4%. This compares to pre-pandemic margins of 2% to 3% on average.

Erin, a nurse at R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Erin and Pasha are lending their voices to MHA’s JoinMdHealth campaign—our field’s first statewide workforce recruitment campaign. The digital advertising launches February 6 and features your best spokespeople—your own awesome team members. This marketing push shines a light on the special opportunities for career development and personal fulfillment available in our hospitals and health systems.

In his inaugural address, our new, history-making governor, Wes Moore, outlined his vision to make Maryland the safest and healthiest state in the nation. This is a goal we all share and one that our fieldwide advocacy agenda will help us reach. The beginning of the Moore administration has been marked by enthusiasm and a fresh energy that many of you experienced at the celebrations surrounding Gov. Moore’s swearing-in.

During the General Assembly’s 445th legislative session, which kicked off January 11, lawmakers will consider serious issues that affect your health systems, your patients, and your communities. MHA and your hospital leaders also have been key to incoming Gov. Wes Moore’s transition planning on health care policy, and we look forward to building on that strong foundation after he is sworn in on January 18.

Omicron put nearly 3,500 Marylanders in your hospital beds on one day—January 11, 2022. Around that time, 15 Maryland hospitals made the extraordinary decision to adopt crisis standards of care.

With the holiday season upon us, we should take the time to reflect on the year now ending. It’s striking how many challenges Maryland hospitals and health systems faced and what you’ve accomplished. Your dedicated, mission-driven teams have been nimble and creative to maintain high standards of care amid workforce shortages, financial stresses, waves of COVID-19, and now an unprecedented flu and RSV season.

We recently reached a milestone: 1,000 days since a Maryland hospital admitted our state’s first patient for COVID-19. Looking back on these past nearly three years, the immense toll of this pandemic—on our workforce, our hospitals, and the people we serve—has yet to be fully revealed. It may be some time before we understand the effects on everything from health equity and behavioral health to education and population health.

While a few results are still being tallied, it’s clear Maryland had a historic election. The statewide elected office winners are the most diverse ever. They include: Maryland’s first Black Governor-elect Wes Moore; Lieutenant Governor-elect Aruna Miller, the first woman of color and first immigrant elected to statewide office in Maryland; Brooke Lierman as our state’s first female Comptroller; and Anthony Brown as our first Black Attorney General.

As we head into flu and respiratory illness season, already there are record numbers of patients overflowing emergency departments and pediatric ICUs. We’re likely to continue to feel the strain throughout the fall and winter, particularly if we see another cold-weather COVID spike. We aim to help you preserve limited resources and peoplepower for the sickest patients—those who truly need hospital care.