From what Mary Ann Arnott has heard, many Allen Countians favor a new county hospital.
Arnott, chairman of the Hospital Facilities Committee, and others in the group weighed in Monday afternoon what they had gleaned after five months of research.
“Everyone needs a good hospital available and the town can’t survive without a good hospital,” Arnott recalled one person saying.
Others had these comments:
* Get the departments, including the laboratory, out of the basement. The laboratory has flooded in the past, damaging its contents.
* Area hospitals are in better shape. When industries scope out a town, the hospital is one of the first things they look at.
* ACH is depressing; the climate is terrible.
* Patient rooms should all be private rooms.
* An urgent care center is needed.
* You can remodel and remodel. Now is the time to build new.
“One person told me he felt like this was our last chance, and if we don’t do it right we might not get another chance,” David Toland said.
“This is the first time for all in the county to have an opportunity to discuss what to do,” Mary Kay Heard said. “I think we shouldn’t wait any longer.”
COMMITTEE members will make a recommendation to county commissioners sometime in the next several weeks. Hospital Facilities Group, Wichita consultants hired by county commissioners, also will make a recommendation.
HFG is doing detailed analysis of the hospital’s infrastructure, including its current and possible services, and reviewing financial data provided by Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), the hospital’s management group. The facilities commission and HFG also are working together.
Today and Wednesday HFG experts are meeting with focus groups, in sessions arranged by the facilities commission. Today they meet with doctors, women whose babies were born at ACH, a citizens group and the hospital board and foundation members. Wednesday they will meet with local government officials, business owners, again with citizens and a group of women who opted to go to other hospitals for obstetric services.
Later this month and in early June facilities commission members will have public meetings in Iola, Moran and Humboldt to hear comments from citizens. They also have visited several area hospitals, both those with critical access designation such as ACH has, and more comprehensive medical centers in Parsons and Fort Scott.
They will use information gleaned from the hospital visits and comments from citizens and professionals, together with their own analysis from tours of ACH, to make their recommendation to county commissioners.
The decision rests with the county commissioners. They have said they’d like to have recommendations from commission members and consultants by mid-summer. If they deem revenue generated by the hospital isn’t sufficient to pay for whatever is proposed, a referendum to decide a tax issue, likely one involving a local sales tax, will be scheduled. If time permits that could be Aug. 3 at the primary election.
MONDAY the facilities commissioners talked about taxes.
“‘I won’t vote for a new school, but I would vote for a new hospital,’ one person told me,” Arnott said.
Mark Boyd said he had heard similar comments, and “I haven’t heard much tax negativity in regard to the hospital,” and also that people seemed to prefer a new hospital rather a remodel of the existing one.
That hospital construction elsewhere almost exclusively has occurred with revenue generated by the hospitals jumps at him, Terry Sparks said. Whatever is done, “should be paid for with revenue from the hospital,” he said. “I think we’d have a hard time passing a property or sales tax.”
“I’m convinced we have no alternative,” but to build new, said Barbara Culbertson, who has a nursing background. She, too, has heard favorable comments about building a new hospital, she said, “and I haven’t heard much about taxes.”
Now is the time to do something and that should be to build new, Toland said.
“We have a legacy of disinvestment in Allen County Hospital,” he said. “Other hospitals (in the area) have been continuously investing” in improvements or new structures, “while the last major construction here was in 1992 or ’93 with the surgery wing.”
Toland’s analysis was that voters would support a new hospital if it provided services that many have said they want.
He and others mentioned such things as urgent care, cardio and orthopedic rehabilitation, podiatry, psychiatry, a children’s clinic, a fitness center attached to physical therapy and transportation for home-bound patients. All, they said, are things offered in area hospitals, often ones that are in competition with ACH for patients, particularly in Humboldt, where patients are as close to Neosho County Regional Medical Center as they are to ACH.
Urgent care that would provide more affordable basic medical services when private physicians offices are closed is a major concern, said several.
“It would be a big selling feature,” Heard said. “We have to offer the basic things,” Sparks added.
A HOSPITAL as a community feature to attract business, industry, residents and specialty doctors also surfaced.
Sparks said three features were important: medical staff and support personnel, “which I think are good,” management and facilities. “They all go hand-in-hand.”
Hospitals in “Chanute and Fort Scott are king and we’re going to have to work hard to win people back,” he said.
“We’re in a time warp here,” with little done recently to improve ACH, Culbertson said, also opining that “employees are unhappy that they don’t get (enough) support from HCA.”
Where ACH is today, “underscores how far we have slipped” in comparison with successes at area hospitals, Toland said.
He proposed that hospital-based clinics in Humboldt and Moran, as well as outlying towns such as Yates Center, would be important in efforts to attract patients to ACH. “And it needs to be a long-term presence. It takes time to change attitudes.
“We’ve kind of contracted just to Iola, just to survive,” he said.
“If we just want to get by, we’re going to die,” Arnott said.
