Dr. Bill Atkinson is WakeMed president & CEO.
When doctors made house calls and the infirmed were cared for at home, family members fulfilled the nursing care role. As health care became more sophisticated, nurses quickly became the cornerstone of the health care system.
Today, nurses provide the backbone of hospital care 24 hours a day, 7 [...]

Wake County EMS recently issued a press release announcing that they will be featured in the April 2010 medical journal, Annals of Emergency Medicine, highlighting the county’s 200 percent improvement in outcomes for victims of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in Wake County.
People who live, work and play in Wake County should be thankful for and take [...]

I wrote the following article at the request of EMS1.com.  It headlined their Thursday newsletter, and I thought many of you would find the content informative as well.
EMS — especially the field care, transportation, communication and workforce components — is an essential part of the U.S. health care system. However, EMS is often out of [...]

The United States employs military troops across the globe to fight terrorism and protect our freedom. And, the service of these troops to their country and the world cannot be overstated or underappreciated.
But overseas is not the only place where we experience terrorism.  When people organize with the purpose to cause harm it creates a [...]

Congressman Brad Miller has been a great friend of WakeMed’s since his days in the North Carolina General Assembly in the 1990’s, and has since been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He’s on his way back up to Washington this week, and was able to stop by WakeMed on Monday to take a [...]

The difficult economy has changed the face of the national health care workforce.  Senior nurses are returning to work, and applications to nursing schools and allied health programs are skyrocketing.  These highly qualified applicants are seeking a career in the stable, “economically immune” health care field. 
It is true that careers in health care are exceedingly [...]

In 1992 I was contacted by the editor of the Accent II, Aurora, Colorado’s weekly magazine inserted into the daily paper.  At the time, I was serving as the executive director of Humana Hospital Aurora.  The topic was health care reform.  This same article could be published today with very few tweaks and would be [...]

The major elements of the health care reform proposals being debated in Congress have remained the same from the start. The focus on improving quality, lowering costs and providing better access to health care has generated many meaningful proposals for reform that are supported by the American Hospital Association and many other healthcare providers. This [...]

I recently met with hospital leaders in North Carolina and across the nation to talk about health care reform.  As a member of the American Hospital Association’s task force on payment reform, we spent much of our time discussing how reform will likely change the way hospitals and other health care providers are paid (or [...]

A few weeks ago I spoke with a group of graduate students at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health about health care in America today. We talked about where the American Hospital Association (AHA) stands on reform, what to expect in future health care trends, and when to anticipate seeing real change in [...]