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For several weeks, New York City has been at the center of a national debate about how many nurses should be on duty at hospitals. Nurses unions have pressed for rules setting minimum staffing levels, arguing that having too few nurses leaves patients at risk. Hospital officials have countered that they need flexibility in deploying their workers and should not be bound by rigid ratios. That dispute spurred more than 10,000 nurses to threaten to walk off their jobs this month at three of New York’s biggest hospital systems. (McGeehan, 4/10)

Patients’ need for accessible, convenient and affordable medical care is fueling the growth of the urgent care industry, according to a recent report by the Urgent Care Association of America. Last year the number of clinics across the U.S. reached 8,774, up 8 percent from the year before, according to the report. The industry has grown each year across the U.S. since 2013, a trend that experts attribute to growing demand for health care alternatives to the emergency room. (Clark, 4/10)

A state agency says at least 17 people in Georgia have been sickened in an outbreak of E. coli infections affecting five U.S. states. The Georgia Department of Public Health said in a news release Wednesday that the number of E. coli cases is expected to increase. A total of 96 E. coli infections have been confirmed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention working with state health officials in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia. No deaths have been reported. (4/10)

Summit County is seeing a steep increase in the number of reported hepatitis A cases, county health officials announced today. The county has seen 32 cases of the infectious illness so far in 2019, with illness rates higher among intravenous drug users and drug abusers, officials said. (Washington, 4/10)

New York City’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai announced Wednesday that it will expand scholarships in a bid to lower the total debt of its medical students, a move that follows other recent debt-relief efforts at New York medical schools. The plan, called the Enhanced Scholarship Initiative, will enable students to graduate with no more than $75,000 in debt, or about $18,750 a year in institutional and federal loans. (West, 4/10)

Before it went bad, Jon Sander and Sandy Mazzella were buddies. They had been business partners in a lawn and landscaping company. The bond between the two North Carolinians was so tightly knit they lived with their families next door to one another on Clearsprings Drive, a residential street with long driveways and spacious lawns in Wake Forest, N.C., just northeast of Raleigh. Sander and Mazzella smoked weed together every day after work, the News & Observer would later report. They shared family vacations and Christmas dinners. Sander reportedly referred to Mazzella as “my little brother.” (Swenson, 4/11)

Roughly 200 striking health care and service workers sang “Happy Birthday” Wednesday to civil rights leader Dolores Huerta at Sacramento’s UC Davis Medical Center, and she returned the tribute by doing what she is known for: exhorting picketers to continue fighting for the rights of rank-and-file workers. (Anderson, 4/10)

Entrepreneur Nathan Spoden, 30, believes consumers prefer health care providers that send appointment reminders via text and offer a billing portal that explains each charge in plain English. MedPilot, a health technology startup now based in Cleveland, can provide that kind of patient service. (Washington, 4/10)

Iowa’s top human services official said Wednesday he doesn’t believe poor medical care contributed to a recent string of deaths among severely disabled residents of a state institution, as critics alleged in a Des Moines Register story published Sunday. Jerry Foxhoven told an advisory council Wednesday that his department does a good job running the Glenwood Resource Center, which houses about 200 Iowans with severe intellectual disabilities in the western side of the state. (Leys, 4/10)

In at least 11 cases, the health system has agreed to do so before the families file suit, “admitting our liability in most cases,” its leaders recently disclosed to investors in bond documents. That some parents are too angry to accept the overture is only the latest setback for All Children’s. In just a few months the region’s most-prestigious hospital has fallen into a state of near-constant turmoil. (McGrory and Bedi, 4/10)

In the past five years in Milwaukee, 594 people have been killed in homicides — leaving at least 6,000 close relatives behind to grieve.Those remaining — often described as “homicide survivors” or “co-victims” — must grapple with elevated health risks, the criminal justice system, social stigma and finding support.Their stories largely go untold. (Luthern, 4/11)

Four people in metro Detroit have been indicted in a more than $9 million healthcare fraud scheme that involved money laundering and racking up claims for dead patients, according to federal officials, adding to a growing pile of healthcare fraud cases in the region. An indictment unsealed Tuesday says a pharmacy owner and pharmacist billed insurers for medications that were never dispensed. The defendants billed insurance companies for delivering over 500 medications to people who had died prior to the claimed date of delivery, officials said Tuesday in a news release. (Jibrell, 4/10)

Mentally ill women are being held in isolation at a jail in south Fulton County under horrific conditions that increase their risk of serious psychological harm and strip away their human dignity, a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges. The unsanitary and degrading conditions “can result in dramatic worsening of symptoms, decompensation, psychosis, self-mutilation and suicide,” the suit said. (Rankin, 4/10)

The Department of Natural Resources is asking a state health agency to study the potential impacts of a group of unregulated contaminants as a prelude to setting safe limits in groundwater. The agency on Wednesday asked the Department of Health Services to review 40 chemical compounds to recommend levels that would protect human health. (Bergquist, 4/10)

Atrium Health, Wake Forest Baptist Health and Wake Forest University signed a memorandum of understanding to merge, the North Carolina-based not-for-profit organizations announced Wednesday. The memorandum kicks off a period of exclusive negotiations as the organizations aim to reach a final agreement later this year. (Kacik, 4/10)

A mother who was asked to move to a more private area while breastfeeding at a Scottsdale school last week is returning to the campus to breastfeed, but this time with other moms. Theresa Phillips posted a video to Facebook last Thursday showing a tense conversation with Kiva Elementary Assistant Principal Matt Gromek, who told her that she could use a separate room on the campus for more privacy while breastfeeding. (Longhi, 4/10)

Normally, a chief financial officer's job involves poring over balance sheets and bank statements. But in the pot business, the job still bears a lot of similarities to the illicit trade — transporting loads of cash under the watchful eye of big guys carrying lots of guns. (Noguchi, 4/10)