1. Arbour Health System
2. CAB Health & Recovery
3. Eliot Community Human Services
4. Kindred Hospitals
5. South Bay Mental Health
6. South Shore Hospital
7. Tufts Health Plan
8. Tufts Medical Center
9. VNA Boston
10.  
11. And More…

Click on the image above to go to source site! 

 Boston Becomes a Food Forward City

I have always believed that Boston has what it takes to be the greatest city in America and that we must seize those opportunities that bring new energy to our community and our economy.  After all, we are competing with places like Portland, Oregon, Austin, Texas and even Greenville, South Carolina – and they’re trying just as hard to do the same.

Wednesday, the Boston Globe pointed out the importance that the food industry can play in our economy and our culture, and highlighted a recent initiative I proposed.

Restaurants are the second-largest private-sector employer in the country and they are often at the leading edge of bringing neighborhoods to life.  Witness the South End and, more recently, Roslindale Square. 

That’s why I’ve been working, over the past two years, to make Boston more business friendly.  Consider this Trifecta:

• We have re-imagined America’s oldest park and just yesterday the State Legislature approved our home rule petition to bid out a long-term lease to restaurants for both the Common and Back Bay Fens.
• We eliminated needless barriers by allowing all outdoor cafes to open any time of the year.
• And now, we’re filing legislation that will encourage mobile restaurants to bring quality, fresh food from both established restaurants and aspiring chefs to our neighborhoods.

Thanks to all of you who support the work I do – and the success of our growing food and restaurant industry here in Boston. 

Sincerely,

Giving Boston residents and youth the support and skills needed to work in health care

Chldren’s Hospital Boston feels an important responsibility to support a wide-variety of efforts to ensure a diverse and committed health care workforce now and in the future. Through its comprehensive workforce development initiatives, the hospital:
• introduces youth to health care as a profession and provides them with support to enter the field or in identifying their own career and educational goals
• supports Boston residents to pursue health careers and seek employment at Children’s
• helps our own employees, including Boston residents, to advance in their careers.

Supporting Boston youth
Since 2007, the COACH Program (Community Opportunities Advancement at Children’s Hospital), has provided full-time paid summer jobs to 159 Boston students. Students are exposed to health care careers while having a safe and productive summer. Job and life-skills workshops are offered to students on topics such as business etiquette, financial basics and communication. Students also tour and learn about colleges in the Longwood area.

39% of Children’s employees live in Boston.

More than $560,000 was spent last year helping Boston employees with tuition assistance and scholarships.

The Student Career Opportunity Outreach Program (SCOOP) was created by Children’s nurses in 2002 to help address the nursing shortage crisis. The goal of the program is to reach out to high school and college students in order to educate and inspire them to pursue a career in the field of nursing. Students from the Boston area are invited to attend a panel presentation of Children’s nurses from a variety of settings followed by a tour of the inpatient units. This year, 100 students from Boston Public Schools attended the panels. Since 2003, SCOOP has sponsored a six-week paid summer internship where 15 students are placed to work in clinical areas of the hospital. This summer, eight students from Boston high schools have been selected to participate in the summer program.

Helping local job-seekers and our own employees
Recognizing that there is a wealth of untapped talent among residents living near the hospital, Children’s actively works to find, train and employ people from local neighborhoods. Children’s also values its own employees as a resource and offers programs to help them advance in their careers. The hospital leads or participates in a number of programs for employees and residents to pursue health careers or seek employment at Children’s.
• Year Up is an intensive year-long training program that provides Boston young adults with technical and professional skills, college credits and paid corporate apprenticeships. Children’s has partnered with the program since 2004, providing funding for 30 participants and hiring 20 graduates as contractors or permanent employees.
• Fenway Community Development Corporation (CDC) “Walk to Work” Program is a career advancement program that helps Fenway and Boston residents find positions close to home. Children’s partners with the CDC and YMCA International providing career skills training to help residents find employment in the medical field.
• Nursing Career Lattice Program provides clinical assistants, food service workers, environmental employees and other racially and ethnically diverse hospital staff who want to purse a career in nursing with academic counseling, mentoring and financial support. The hospital works with employees and area colleges/universities to identify the prerequisite courses and nursing programs that will allow each employee to successfully complete nursing school.
• SkillWorks, an initiative to improve workforce development in Boston and Massachusetts, helps low-income residents attain family-supporting jobs and businesses to find skilled workers. More than 50 Children’s employees currently participate in this program where they enroll in pre-college classes to study medical coding, nursing and medical imaging. Children’s SkillsWorks participants who want to pursue a career in nursing have the added benefit of applying to the Nursing Career Lattice Program, which helps them to achieve that goal.

Photo caption: Dale Addae Smith, Fenway resident, works full-time at Children’s after finding employment through the hospital’s partnership with the Fenway CDC’s Walk to Work Program.  Photo provided by Children’s Hospital

[This information was originally published here -ed].

According to Whittier Street Health Center executive director, Frederica Williams, Whittier Street has been looking for a permanent home for the last 30 years.

Now, thanks to a stimulus award, it is finally getting one.

The Whittier Street Health Center has a long history in Boston, starting from 1933 when it opened as a well baby clinic to address health issues within the low income population in the city. Over the years, the Health Center has evolved into a medical and community center that serves its neighborhoods’ needs in every possible way from basic health care to a prison re-entry program to a refugee health assessment site to a geriatric clinic and more. The center recently launched an urgent care clinic and its preventive care programs include an obesity clinic, an asthma clinic and a men’s health clinic

Just eight years ago, the center was serving 5,000 people a year. These days, that number has ballooned to 13,000 and, not surprisingly, space has become increasingly tight. Williams says that the center has tried to make due by expanding its daily hours and opening over the weekend but that has not managed to fully relieve the overcrowding.

***** WATER EMERGENCY UPDATE *****

Residents should flush household plumbing before resuming regular water use

Today, the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA) has notified Mayor Thomas M. Menino that as of 3:30am this morning the drinking water in the City of Boston is safe for consumption. Residents and businesses must flush their household plumbing by running water for at least 1 minute before resuming regular use.

“I would like to thank the residents of Boston, the city’s emergency responders, and our local leaders for their cooperation and collaboration during this water emergency,” said Mayor Menino. “We have once again shown that Boston is a strong and resilient community that works together to get through a crisis.”

The MWRA is advising residents to “flush” their water. Flushing your household and building water lines includes interior and exterior faucets, showers, water and ice dispensers, and water treatment units. Residents are encouraged to consider the following advice:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR POST-BOIL ORDER

Residents are advised to “flush” their water to clear plumbing of potentially contaminated water. Flushing your household and building water lines includes interior and exterior faucets; showers; water and ice dispensers; water treatment units, etc.

Cold Water Faucets: Run tap water until the water feels cold, 1 minute or more, before drinking, tooth brushing, or using for food preparation.

Hot Water Faucets: To clear hot water pipes and water heater of untreated water, turn on all hot water faucets and flush for a minimum of 15 minutes for a typical household 40-gallon hot water tank and 30 minutes for an 80-gallon hot water tank or larger. Never use water from the “hot” faucet for drinking, cooking, or other internal-consumption purposes. After this flushing, hot water is then safe to use for washing hands, and for hand-washing of dishes, pots and pans, etc.

Refrigerators: Water dispensers from refrigerators should be flushed by at least one quart of water.

Dishwashers: After flushing hot water pipes and water heater, run dishwasher empty one time.

Humidifiers: Discard any water used in humidifiers, Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP), oral, medical or health care devices, and rinse the device with clean water.

Food and baby formula: Be sure you have discarded any baby formula or other foods prepared with water on the days of the boil order. (If unsure of the dates contact your water Department.)

Ice cubes: Automatic ice dispensers should be emptied of ice made during the boil order. Then, discard ice made over an additional 24 hour period to assure complete purging of the water supply line.

Boston residents with questions or concerns should call the Mayor’s 24-Hour Hotline at (617) 635-4500 or through our website www.cityofboston.gov which will have extra staff on hand to help assist with. Additional information is also available on cityofboston.gov.

Rising to meet an infinite need – Partners in Health, long a force in Haiti, vaults into central role
By Stephen Smith and James F. Smith – Globe Staff / January 24, 2010

CANGE, Haiti – His hometown in ruins, his right arm broken, Frantz Verdieu knew he had to escape the acrid air and rubble-strewn streets of Port-au-Prince.

There was, he decided in the desperate hours after the earthquake that sundered the capital city, only one place to seek safe harbor and medical care: Cange, a town of about 30,000 in Haiti’s Central Plateau, and the birthplace of Partners in Health.

So he traversed mountain roads – rough as a washboard in patches – along with hundreds of others who fled here by auto, truck, and bus. Overnight, they crowded Cange with their needs, and transformed the mission of an organization that for 25 years has built a worldwide reputation by treating tuberculosis, AIDS, and other chronic diseases that flourish among Haiti’s poor.

“I took four cars to get here,’’ the 34-year-old teacher said, sitting inside a chapel converted into a ward for the injured on the organization’s bucolic but overrun campus. “I heard about the name before, and I knew I needed to get here.’’

With 10 hospitals and deep roots in Haiti, Boston-based Partners in Health has became one of the pillars of the worldwide response to the Jan. 12 earthquake.

[Partners in Health has offices at 888 Commonwealth Ave.]

Startling ‘Treasures’ to behold at Boston Public Library
By Tenley Woodman/Boston Herald – January 24, 2010

There’s only one place you can leaf through a copy of William Shakespeare’s “First Folio” from 1623 and also touch President John Adams’ personal copy of “Common Sense” – and do it for free.

The Boston Public Library in Copley Square.

“We are a public library and we really take our public mission very seriously,” said Susan Glover, keeper of the BPL’s special collections.

There are nearly five million items stored in the library’s special collections, ranging in age and scope from medieval manuscripts to photographs of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt performing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Support for president holds in MIT group

By Ira Kantor/Boston Herald – January 24, 2010
President Obama capped off his first 12 months with a job-approval rating that has dipped by a dozen percentage points since he got to work in Washington last Jan. 20.

One group Obama has not lost favor with is Chocolate City, a 28-member black organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Members say the president “hit the ground running” by taking on problems left by the Bush administration.

“Just because of the climate of what he inherited, you would need almost a superhuman to be able to tackle it,” said Howard Liles, 22, a mechanical engineering major and Chocolate City’s co-chairman.

“I mean he believed in change and that doesn’t mean you’re not going to make mistakes,” he said. “But the fact is he was doing his best efforts, and I feel that’s all you can really ask of an individual.”

Obama’s job-approval rating, according to a Gallup poll released Jan. 18, is at 51 percent, a 12 percent decrease from a year ago. Chocolate City, which takes its name from a 1975 song by funk band Parliament about blacks rising to the White House, said much of Obama’s performance was “motivating,” including his efforts to bridge diplomacy between foreign nations.

Gardner design in tune
By Carley Thornell/Boston herald – January 24, 2010

It must have been destiny for a man with the name Renzo Piano to design a new performance hall.

“Music is my beloved art,” the architect of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s expansion said. “It is what I wanted to be myself.”

That appreciation gave the prize-winning architect a touch for performance-hall design, and the Gardner project marks his 14th such undertaking. The 296-seat venue is to be the capstone in his cantilevered, modular, glass- and light-filled new building, next to the old museum in the Fenway.

It is a striking juxtaposition to the 1903 Italian-style palace that for a century has enchanted visitors who stumble upon its Venetian-inspired courtyard. But the buildings are of a piece, said Piano.

Isabella Gardner “tried building a modern Venetian palace. It does capture the magic of Venice,” he said. “You enter this space that is timeless. That’s Venice. It’s not about tourists, it’s not about food, it’s about the light made by the water, and water makes things beautiful.” Sound and light are the two cornerstones of the new “music box,” he said, as the hall will have a glass ceiling to let in sun.