MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) — Kansas State University has received a $1 million donation from the William T. Kemper Foundation in Kansas City.

The university says the gift will go toward renovating and expanding the Seaton Complex at the College of Architecture, Planning & Design.

Kansas State said in a news release that the $75 million project will include consolidated fabrication capabilities, design labs, collaborative spaces and a 300-seat auditorium.

Kemper was University of Missouri graduate. He was a civic leader in Kansas City and achieved top positions in banking in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma.

The Kemper Foundation supports education, health and human services, the arts and civic improvements.

SEDAN, Kan- A Kansas man was injured in a rollover crash just after 8 a.m. on Wednesday in Chautauqua County.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2007 Ford Truck driven by Travis Daniel Goeken, 32, Augusta, was southbound on Kansas 99 three miles south of the Elk County line.

The truck’s rear dual tires left the roadway. The driver over corrected and the truck rolled coming to a rest in the west ditch.

Goeken was transported to Sedan city hospital.

The KHP reported he was properly restrained at the time of the accident.

By Jim McLean
KHI News Service

TOPEKA — Conservatives had two reasons for advocating deep cuts in state income tax rates, according to one of the legislative leaders who championed them.
The first, and most often touted by Gov. Sam Brownback, was to lower taxes for business owners so that they could use the savings to create more jobs.

But a second and less talked about goal was to shrink state government by reducing tax collections and forcing legislators to cut spending, according to Senate President Susan Wagle.

“Government has less money to spend, but that’s what the people are asking for, they want more money in their pockets,” Wagle said late last week after the state finance council approved an intergovernmental loan of $675 million to help the state pay its bills.

As the leader of a conservative Republican majority in the Senate, Wagle said she is “excited” about “having a smaller government.”

Asked after the meeting whether the tax cuts were in part designed to reduce revenues and force spending cuts, Wagle said: “I can tell you that’s how I view it as a conservative Republican, yes. I think you do have to put restraints on government and on taxation and operate in the same manner as all the private businesses out there.”

Brownback said while he favors “less taxes coming to the government,” the tax cuts – which virtually eliminated income taxes for approximately 200,000 owners of large and small Kansas businesses – were intended to create jobs, not shrink state government.

“That’s why we’ve been focusing on income taxes, particularly for small business, because that’s your job-creating engine,” Brownback said.

Democrats, who blame the tax cuts for a sharp downturn in state revenue collections, were quick to seize on Wagle’s comments.

“Senator Wagle is probably as honest as anybody about this,” said Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, of Topeka.

Hensley said he believes that Wagle and “some of her constituents” want to use the tax cuts to force spending cuts and shrink government. But he said he doesn’t believe most Kansans want to see reductions in funding for public schools, higher education, highways and social safety net programs.
“She (Wagle) may not be miscalculating what some of her constituents believe, but I think she is certainly miscalculating what the average Kansas family believes,” Hensley said.

Over the past two months, tax collections have fallen $310 million short of projections even though the projections already had been adjusted in anticipation of lower income tax collections.

Brownback maintains that changes in federal tax rates on capital gains are responsible for most of the downturn. However, a recent report from the nonpartisan Rockefeller Institute of Government says that while the federal changes have negatively affected income-tax collections in most states, the reductions in Kansas and a handful of other states have been much steeper due to state legislated tax cuts.

“The largest declines were reported in Ohio, North Dakota and Kansas at 31.1, 28.1 and 24 percent, respectively,” the report said. “In all three states the large declines are at least partially attributable to legislative tax changes, including income tax rate reductions.”

TOPEKA — The first draft of the Kansas Water Vision will be posted to the Kansas Water Office website on July 1 so citizens are able to provide input to the Governor’s Water Vision Team on the statewide tour that will be held July 7 to 11.

“The team began gathering input in December from stakeholders of all water uses to develop this first draft,” said Susan Metzger, Vision Team Leader -Kansas Water Office. “There were some resounding messages throughout the last few months: a strong, long-term water Vision for Kansas must be statewide while recognizing that one size does not fit all; a reliable water supply is bigger than quantity and the quality of our water resources is equally important; and public information and education is critical to the successful adoption of the Vision.”

As seen the past few years with extremes of extended drought to cases of flooding, the entire state and its residents are affected by what happens with water supplies and its management. Last fall, Gov. Sam Brownback called for a 50 Year Vision to ensure a reliable water supply for Kansas citizens.

“We are looking forward to hearing from Kansans,” Secretary Jackie McClaskey said. “The entire state is affected by what happens with our water, no matter what area of Kansas you live in. Water determines everything from community and industry survival and growth to making us marketable for other opportunities.”

Stakeholders and Kansas citizens are encouraged to attend one of the Vision Tour input sessions. For more information about the Governor’s Call to Action for a 50-Year Vision and a list of times and addresses for each tour location, click HERE.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A unanimous Supreme Court says police may not generally search the cellphones of people they arrest without first getting search warrants.

The justices say cellphones are powerful devices unlike anything else police may find on someone they arrest.

Chief Justice John Roberts says that because the phones contain so much information, police must get a warrant before looking through them.

By Jordan Rau
Kaiser Health News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — During a hernia operation, Dorothea Handron’s surgeon unknowingly pierced her bowel. It took five days for doctors to determine she had an infection. By the time they operated on her again, she was so weakened that she was placed in a medically induced coma at Vidant Medical Center in Greenville, North Carolina.

Comatose and on a respirator for six weeks, she contracted pneumonia. “When they stopped the sedation and I woke up, I had no idea what had happened to me,” said Handron, 60. “I kind of felt like Rip Van Winkle.”
Because of complications like Handron’s, Vidant, an academic medical center in eastern North Carolina, is likely to have its Medicare payments docked this fall through the government’s toughest effort yet to crack down on infections and other patient injuries, federal records show.

A quarter of the nation’s hospitals – those with the worst rates – will lose 1 percent of every Medicare payment for a year starting in October. In April, federal officials released a preliminary analysis of which hospitals would be assessed, identifying 761. When Medicare sets final penalties later this year, that list may change because the government will be looking at performance over a longer period than it used to calculate the draft penalties. Vidant, for instance, says it lowered patient injury rates over the course of 2013, and Handron praises their efforts.

The sanctions, estimated to total $330 million over a year, kick in at a time when most infections measured in hospitals are on the decline, but still too common. In 2012, one out of every eight patients nationally suffered a potentially avoidable complication during a hospital stay, the government estimates. Even infections that are waning are not decreasing fast enough to meet targets set by the government. Meanwhile new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are making infections much harder to cure.

Dr. Clifford McDonald, a senior adviser at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the worst performers “still have a lot of room to move in a positive direction.”

Are the metrics right?

Medicare’s penalties are going to hit some types of hospitals harder than others, according to an analysis of the preliminary penalties conducted for Kaiser Health News by Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. Publicly owned hospitals and those that treat large portions of low-income patients are more likely to be assessed penalties. So are large hospitals, hospitals in cities and those in the West and Northeast. Preliminary penalties were assigned to more than a third of hospitals in Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming, Medicare records show.

“We want hospitals focused on patient safety and we want them laser-focused on eliminating patient harm,” said Dr. Patrick Conway, chief medical officer of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

The biggest impact may be on the nation’s major teaching hospitals: 54 percent were marked for preliminary penalties, Jha found. The reasons for such high rates of complications in these elite hospitals are being intensely debated. Leah Binder, CEO of The Leapfrog Group, a patient safety organization, said academic medical centers have such a diverse mix of specialists and competing priorities of research and training residents that safety is not always at the forefront. Nearly half of the teaching hospitals — 123 out of 266 in Jha’s analysis — had low enough rates to avoid penalties.

The government takes into account the size of hospital, the location where the patient was treated and whether it is affiliated with a medical school when calculating infection rates. But the Association of American Medical Colleges and some experts question whether those measures are precise enough. “Do we really believe that large academic medical centers are providing such drastically worse care, or is it that we just haven’t gotten our metrics right?” Jha said. “I suspect it’s the latter.”

Medicare assigned a preliminary penalty to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, for instance, but Dr. Gary Noskin, the chief medical officer, said hospitals that are more vigilant in catching problems end up looking worse. “If you don’t look for the clot, you’re never going to find it,” he said.

Another concern is there may be little difference in the performance between hospitals that narrowly draw penalties and those that barely escape them. That is because the health law requires Medicare to punish the worst-performing quarter of the nation’s hospitals each year, even if they have been improving.

“Hospitals that have been working hard to reduce infections may end up in the penalty box,” said Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and public safety at the American Hospital Association.

Pay-for-performance, part three

The Hospital-Acquired Condition (HAC) Reduction Program, created by the 2010 health law, is the third of the federal health law’s major mandatory pay-for-performance programs for hospitals. The first levies penalties against hospitals with high readmission rates and the second awards bonuses or penalties based on two dozen quality measures. Both are in their second year. When all three programs are in place this fall, hospitals will be at risk of losing up to 5.4 percent of their Medicare payments.

In the first year of the HAC penalties, Medicare will look at three measures. One is the frequency of bloodstream infections in patients with catheters inserted into a major vein to deliver antibiotics, nutrients, chemotherapy or other treatments. The second is the rates of infections from catheters inserted into the bladder to drain urine. Both those assessments will be based on infections during 2012 and 2013.

Finally, Medicare will examine a variety of avoidable safety problems in patients that occurred from July 2011 through June 2013, including bedsores, hip fractures, blood clots and accidental lung punctures. Over the next few years, Medicare will also factor in surgical site infections and infection rates from two germs that are resistant to antibiotic treatments: Clostridium difficile, known as C. diff, and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.

Vidant is worse than average in catheter-associated urinary tract infections and serious complications from surgery in the latest statistics Medicare published on its Hospital Compare website. But in more recent data the medical center voluntarily reports on its website, the number of catheter and urinary tract infections dropped during 2013. Joan Wynn, Vidant Health’s chief quality and safety officer, said complications rates are dropping this year as well.

The prospect of penalties is “difficult when you know how much your performance is improved,” said Wynn. She said Vidant has taken many steps to reduce complications, added patients to internal committees and now reveals on its website the number of infections, patient falls, medication errors and bed sores.

Vidant asked Handron, a retired nursing professor injured in 2009, to tell her experience to the trustees and make a video for the medical staff talking about it. She continues to advise the hospital. “I know they’re going in the very right direction,” Handron said. “I would have absolutely zero concern about myself or a family member going to Vidant for anything now.”

Nationally, rates of some infections are decreasing. Catheter-related infections, for instance, dropped 44 percent between 2008 and 2012. Still, the CDC estimates that in 2011, about 648,000 patients — 1 in 25 — picked up an infection while in the hospital, and 75,000 died.

Rates of urinary tract infections have not dropped despite efforts. These infections are more likely the longer a line is left in, but sometimes they are not removed promptly out of convenience for the nurse or patient or simply institutional lethargy. Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, which has higher urinary catheter infection rates than do most hospitals, has given nurses more authority to remove catheters so long as they follow guidelines for when removal is appropriate, said Dr. Michael Myint, Swedish’s vice president for quality and patient safety. “Historically, they would just wait for the physician’s order to come through,” Myint said.

Medicare has been pressuring hospitals for several years to lower rates of injuries to patients. In 2008 Medicare started refusing to reimburse hospitals for the extra cost of treating patients for avoidable complications. A subsequent study by Harvard researchers found no evidence that the change led to lower infection rates.

“With infections, we are moving in the right direction,” said Lisa McGiffert, who directs the patient safety program at Consumers Union, “but I would not say we are anywhere near where we need to be.”

Patient advocates praise move

Patient advocates say the financial penalties are long overdue, given how little accountability there has been. Gerald Guske discovered that in 2012 when he went into Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Va., for an artificial hip implant. Doctors later had to reopen the incision and wash out Guske’s implant. Guske, a retired electronic technician, was laid up for a month in a rehabilitation facility while strong antibiotics were pumped directly into a vein.

Martha Jefferson told Guske it had followed proper protocols. “Unfortunately, infection is a known risk of any surgery, and even when everything is performed correctly and conditions are ideal, they can occur,” the hospital wrote him afterward. “Infection does not necessarily indicate that something went wrong.”

Martha Jefferson Hospital said it could not discuss the case because of patient privacy laws. The hospital’s infection control specialist, Dr. Keri Hall, said infection rates have been dropping and “we are every day doing what we can to hopefully bring our rates down to zero.”

Guske said he has fully recovered, “other than taking six weeks out of my life,” but he attributes the stress around his complications to a minor stroke his wife suffered. He said state regulators told him they could not take any action because the hospital followed proper procedures. The fear of a financial penalty against a hospital, Guske said, is “the only thing that’s really going to change matters.”

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas State Board of Education is preparing to approve regulations for implementing a new state law allowing people with relevant experience but no education degree to obtain teaching licenses.

Legislators approved the measure as a way to increase the available pool of teachers in science, math, engineering and technology in secondary schools.

The board has already given the regulations preliminary approval. Final approval at a meeting Wednesday is the last step before the law takes effect July 1.

The regulations would allow applicants without education degrees to receive Kansas teaching licenses if they have at least a bachelor’s degree and at least five years of related work experience in the designated subjects. Applicants could also qualify with an industry-recognized certificate in a technical profession and five years of related work experience.

Kevin Griffith, JCPost

MANHATTAN, Kan- The Kicker Country Stampede is entering it’s 19th year and kicks off Thursday at Tuttle Creek State Park in Manhattan.

Security will be, for the most part, the same according to Kurt Moldrup,Head of Security. He explained that the only difference will be the addition of a party pit at the front of the stage and in front of the V.I.P. area.

“We’ll probably have to make some changes as far as how we secure that area to allow people in just to the party pit and such as that. Overall there’s no expected changes things run very smooth and we expect it to continue to do so,” Moldrup said.

One thing that Moldrup wants people to know is that if they plan to attend they need to arrive early.

“We’ve got thousands of people coming for these concerts, and you can’t just leave 20 minutes before the concert and expect to be able to get in, parking and get to your seating or out into the festival. So people should plan ahead and leave early.”

This years festival is expected to draw a record sized crowd and so it will be more important to try and arrive early.

Other things that people need to know is that if you do plan to consume alcohol at the festival you need to do so responsibly, Moldrup added.

“Make sure you have a designated driver, take care of your friends, look out and after each other. Both security and law enforcement out there take a very strong and zero tolerance for underage drinking as well as any illegal or even, just disruptive behavior. With this large of a crowd we really have to have just zero tolerance.”

Rain has always caused a problem at one point during the festival and Moldrup said that they are expecting a little more rain this year and warns people to not play in the mud in the festival grounds.

“We really want to discourage people from getting into big mud fights and sliding in the mud. While that’s all fund and so on the problem is you get all muddy like that when your in a crowded group of people, others don’t want to be muddy and then you brush up against them and that’s how we have conflicts.”

It can also be dangerous and has caused injuries before because there may be rocks, broken glass, and metal under that mud.

“We really take a pretty much zero tolerance to on the mud fights, mud slinging because it just invariably ends up into a conflict, so we will remove people that get into that kind of behavior because it’s just not safe for anyone and leads to problems.”

Gates will open Thursday at 4:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

 

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — An Arizona company says it has successfully completed the first scale test flight of a high-altitude balloon and capsule being developed to take tourists to the edge of space.

World View Enterprises of Tucson said Tuesday that it launched the flight last week from Roswell, New Mexico.

CEO Jane Poynter says the system broke the world record for highest parafoil flight, lifting a payload one-tenth of what is planned for passenger flight to 120,000 feet.

Poynter says the company is still planning to begin its $75,000 per-person flights in 2016. The balloons will lift a capsule carrying six passengers to about 100,000, where they will float for about two hours.

She says the company hasn’t yet decided where its operations will be based, although Spaceport America in New Mexico is among the options.