Around the horn: new RI hospital chief, five bidders for Conn. hospital, flap over foreign-student clerkships in NYC

A well-known figure in Massachusetts medicine will become president and chief executive officer of Rhode Island Hospital, the Providence Journal reports. Dr. Timothy J. Babineau will be leaving the University of Maryland Medical Center, where he had been senior vice president and chief medical officer since 2005, but before that he had been vice chairman of surgery, surgical residency program director, and director of the center for minimally invasive surgery at Boston Medical Center. He had also been surgeon-in-chief and medical director for Boston Medical Center Surgery Associates at Quincy Medical Center.

Financially ailing University of Connecticut Health Care Center has five potential suitors, according to the Hartford Courant. Hartford Hospital combined with the Hospital of Central Connecticut to make a joint proposal, and St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, Bristol Hospital, and Connecticut Children's Medical Center each made bids. Farmington-based UConn health center, which includes medical and dental schools, a research laboratory, and 224-bed John Dempsey Hospital, has struggled financially since it opened in the 1960s despite state bailouts, the Courant story says.

New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation is taking some heat for its deal with a Caribbean medical school, a New York Times story says. Medical schools in the city don't like the $100 million deal with the profit-making St. George’s University School of Medicine on the island of Grenada to provide clinical training for hundreds of students at the city’s 11 public hospitals. They worry that precious slots for third- and fourth-year students will go to affluent students who could not get into schools in the United States. The arrangement was proposed by a member of the corporation’s board who has long worked for the Caribbean school, the story says.