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 WEST MICHIGAN — A trio of projects planned at West Michigan hospitals come after a relatively quiet period for health care construction.
Holland Hospital, Saint Mary’s Health Care in Grand Rapids and Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon are each planning renovations or expansions for 2012.
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 GRAND RAPIDS — The health care jobs that are projected to grow the fastest in the years ahead reflect talent demands that are driven by an aging and unhealthy population, as well as changes in how care is delivered.
A need for more nurses easily tops an annual heath care employment outlook for West Michigan issued by Grand Valley State University economists. Using 2008-2018 projections from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, plus local graduation, retirement and turnover rates, GVSU projects health care providers will hire an average 1,747 nurses annually in the region for the next several years.
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WEST MICHIGAN — Sustainability is increasingly being defined not just by “green” — which can have a number of convoluted meanings — but by companies crunching large matrices of waste and energy use data and coming to meaningful solutions.
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GRAND RAPIDS — A West Michigan couple adopts a three-year old boy and finds out four years later that the child’s gall bladder had been removed before the adoption.
Now the couple has to take a binder that they fill with their son’s medical history from doctor to doctor, hospital to hospital, to make sure that care providers are up to date on their child’s condition and know what testing has been done, what medication has been given, “so we don’t have to try all of those things over again.”
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 GRAND RAPIDS — As West Michigan transforms into more of a destination for health care, hospitals and health organizations will increasingly be expected to provide accommodations for family members of patients, many of whom will be coming from out of the area for treatment.
The trend has already started. Saint Mary’s Health Care and Spectrum Health are two of just a handful of Michigan health care organizations that have guest houses for patient family members.
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 GRAND RAPIDS — With the addition of a clinical trial unit, a West Michigan hospital is adding another component to the health care cluster in the region.
Saint Mary’s Health Care recently finished putting the final touches on a 6,000-square-foot, eight-bed clinical trial unit that the health system hopes will attract Phase 1 oncology and neurological clinical drug trials to the region. West Michigan hospitals already draw Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials, but the unit will attract drug treatments at the earliest stages of human trials.
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GRAND RAPIDS — Securing the right amount of space to grow an organization in an urban setting can be a challenge, but Grand Valley State University hopes its recent purchase of downtown property will meet the long-term needs of its health care programs.
The 1.6-acre site, adjacent to GVSU’s Cook-DeVos Center for Health Sciences, consists of 15 parcels assembled by Rockford Development Group LLC. The property is bounded by Hastings and Trowbridge streets and Lafayette and Prospects avenues, an area now made up of mostly rental homes in the Belknap Lookout neighborhood. The property purchase expands GVSU’s investment in the Medical Mile.
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 GRAND RAPIDS — By any measure, the growth of Kids’ Food Basket over the last decade is phenomenal.
In just over nine years, the Grand Rapids-based nonprofit group has upped the number of sack suppers it serves to poor children each weekday from 250 to more than 4,300. Its budget has soared from $20,000 to $3.8 million.
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 KALAMAZOO — There’s been no shortage of ink on Michigan’s shortage of doctors and nurses, but that’s not the shortfall that most concerns a new alliance of health care providers in Southwest Michigan.
Their top priority is a shortage of well-prepared direct-care workers — Certified Nursing Assistants and Personal Care Assistants. There are about 155,000 people employed in direct care, and it is the state’s fastest growing employment sector, according to a study funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
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GRAND RAPIDS — The Van Andel Research Institute and two Michigan cancer centers form part of a “dream team” studying cancer stem cells in the battle with an aggressive subtype of breast cancer.
