Misconceptions still remain with hospital, bond

Concerning the East Adams Rural Hospital and the bond request that will be on the upcoming ballot: there are two very serious misconceptions still apparently common in the community, and it is vital that the correct facts be known.

First is that we don’t really need a hospital with emergency room “because if it’s anything serious they’re just going to take me to Spokane anyway.” Who do you suppose “they” are? Do you reckon that if you collapse on your living-room floor clutching your chest, a MedStar helicopter will just materialize on your front lawn? MedStar picks up patients who have been attended to and stabilized by “first responders,” which means an ambulance and trained personnel; it is the care that those aptly designated first responders give that will often determine whether patients live or die, or – even if they do live – whether they survive essentially whole or whether they are disabled for the rest of their lives. The phrase “minutes count” is exactly and literally true.

I happen to have in front of me the latest copy of the “MedStar Member News,” and the stories in it are instructive. “The medical team at Samaritan Hospital worked on Don until the NW MedStar helicopter arrived.” Or “‘We all feel it was the timeframe that made the difference,’ said his wife Mickey of the EMS providers on scene and about how quickly the NW MedStar helicopter arrived.” Again and again, it is the first-response EMS team and the hospital resources that allow these survivors to be alive and well to talk about it afterwards. EARH is a “Level V Trauma-Care Center,” meaning that what they do in the ambulances and the ER is what stabilizes a patient enough to even allow transportation to a more major facility; without that stabilization care, there often would be no patients to transport, just corpses.

The second appallingly wrong misconception is that an ER isn’t needed, just a Rural Health Clinic. This is, besides other things, a matter of money: an accredited Critical-Access Hospital, which EARH is, is compensated by Medicare and Medicaid, (which are roughly two-thirds of the district’s income), at rates substantially higher than those for Rural Health Clinics; the difference, for most communities, is between being able to afford to operate and not being able to operate at all. That is exactly why the designation “Critical-Access Hospital” was created: to give remote communities enough dollar resources to be able to operate and serve those communities. You cannot have an ER without a hospital (in particular, a Critical-Access hospital), and that is that.

There are very important matters that need explaining to the community about why the District needs a new facility, but before we can even get to those, we urgently need to clear away the clogging underbrush of misunderstandings and misconceptions about “whether we even need a hospital.” Unless you fancy the idea of people – who might be your neighbors, your family, or even you – needlessly dying or being seriously disabled for life, then yes, we need a hospital. We need this hospital.

Eric & Lynn Walker, Ritzville