The announcement this week that Desert Springs Hospital would be shutting down its inpatient operations and laying off nearly 1,000 employees sent ripples throughout the Las Vegas Valley.

The "America's Health Rankings 2022 Annual Report" is out, and it showed Nevada landed at the bottom or close to it among the states, on multiple health care measures.

Local doctors are on high alert over a fungus that is causing serious infections. Hospitals are seeing an influx of patients ranging from the flu, RSV, and COVID.

Early in his presidency, George Washington opined that the promotion of both science and literature was the basis of public happiness and that they were also the very basis of democracy. If Nevada were to use health care as a surrogate for science, and public education as a surrogate for literature, Washington would have reason for concern. Nevada currently ranks in the bottom half of states for quality of health care and ranks 45th for public school systems.

Patients are waiting an average of 26 days for a scheduled appointment with a doctor according to a new survey by Merritt Hawkins. The group polled more than 1,000 physician offices looking at average wait times among family medicine, dermatology, obstetrics/gynecology, orthopedic surgery and cardiology.

A new medical school building at UNLV hopes to relieve the doctor shortage that's plaguing Nevada by adding more students and churning out more medical graduates.

A brand new UNLV Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine education building has a goal to help everyday Nevadans get better access to a doctor: by adding more students and churning out more medical graduates, the school will in turn help relieve the doctor shortage plaguing Nevada.

As UNLV works toward establishing an Academic Health Center, it should coordinate with University Medical Center and other nearby partners in the Las Vegas Medical District — Valley Hospital, Desert Radiology, Steinberg Diagnostic, Clinical Simulation Center of Las Vegas and the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health — for an optimal web of quality care, according to findings from a new economic impact study.