We Must Save St. Mark’s
To the Editor:
I am concerned about the fate of our hospital. Having a community hospital to serve the needs of Fayette County is vitally important. Not having a hospital would adversely affect the quality of life for all our citizens. The availability of a local hospital speaks to the quality of life of a community, just like the good schools and police and fire protection does. It’s something that is considered when choosing where to locate a business or where to choose to spend your retirement years.
Blaming the board for the problem doesn’t help. Maybe the majority of the cause is the fact the hospital was more expensive than the income can support, so we need to come up with a plan to make up the short fall.
My biggest concern is, are the County Judge, Commissioners, and Mayor willing to all sit down together with the hospital board to figure out a viable long-range solution to the problem? We need a permanent solution. Is it possible to receive a waiver from HUD to make St. Mark’s a critical care hospital? Maybe our Congressmen and Senators could help us get an exemption to the 35-mile adjacent hospital rule.
Could we get a commitment from the county and city government to a yearly financial infusion of funds to alleviate the shortfall that the hospital experiences? If the county and cities experience added expenses due to reduced services, could they allocate that money to save the hospital?
Could all of our political and business leaders support another “We Care” fund raising campaign to go toward reducing the hospital debt like we did before the hospital was built? It would benefit every business, bank, and utility to support another capital campaign. The five banks could offer matching gift incentives for the smaller contributions.
It does not seem likely the community would support another hospital district vote, since it was defeated by such a large margin the last time. Maybe it could get enough support if it was specified that it would be limited to a specific small amount of tax, like .05 cents per $1,000.
Maybe, St. Mark’s could offer additional services that they are not providing now. There is a wing of the hospital not in use that could offer rehabilitation services. Would it be possible to offer dialysis services to increase revenue? If you know of another needed service, make someone aware of it.
Hopefully some combination of these proposals could get us where we need to be to save our hospital. We must face the fact that we need to be willing to make the hard decisions required to save St. Mark’s Hospital. We need our hospital, and this is our last chance to save it. We need to get back our operating room, if only for day surgeries, to keep from losing our doctors.
We also need inpatient care to return as soon as possible. If anyone has any other suggestions, I’m sure they would be welcome. Doing nothing is not an option. Please don’t let us lose our hospital.