Access to hospitals and emergency care have frequented local media reports since two local hospitals began a dizzying process of finding new locations, eventually deciding to flip-flop cities.
Sacred Heart Medical Center, currently just blocks away from the University on 13th Avenue in downtown Eugene, and McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center in Springfield are scheduled to switch cities. Sacred Heart will move to a RiverBend property in Springfield while McKenzie-Willamette recently announced it will move to a spot on North Delta River Highway.
The switch has raised numerous issues, including where to site the hospitals so residents of both communities will have physical access to emergency facilities. The Willamette River poses a key challenge; the new Eugene hospital will be across the river from downtown, and residents would be unable to reach it if local bridges were damaged during a disaster. Further, some critics of the
Sacred Heart move have expressed concerns about flooding at the RiverBend location.
The economics of hospitals have also been a factor. Sadly, both PeaceHealth’s Sacred Heart and McKenzie-Willamette are investor-owned (read: for-profit) hospitals. Both cities thus want a hospital to help boost the local economy.
The debate surrounding this switch corresponds with the unfortunate status of emergency health care in Oregon. A national report released Tuesday by the American College of Emergency Physicians, ranks Oregon 35th for its “support of an emergency care system to meet the needs of its residents,” garnering a C-minus grade.
Especially poor was our ratio of hospital-staffed beds per 1,000 people (1.8), for which we ranked 49th in the nation. Should a disaster cause just 1/16 of Oregon’s’ population to need hospital treatment, nearly 63 people would have to be
assigned to a single bed.
Our number of registered nurses per 1,000
people (8.45) and our annual per capita expenditure on hospital care ($1,112) were also among the nation’s ten worst rankings.
These statistics come as we increasingly rely on emergency care to compensate for lack of adequate health insurance. Nationally, the number of visits to emergency departments increased 26 percent, from 90.3 million to 113.9 million from 1993 to 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Oregon, about 17
percent of the population doesn’t even have health care, according to the report.
Hospitals are obligated to help all emergency patients, regardless of their ability to pay. To compensate for these losses, hospitals pass “charity” care costs on to other patients, raising prices. In 2003, Sacred Heart Medical Center alone incurred $16 million in charity care (“Oregon Health Plan’s lowered enrollment helps save millions,” ODE, April 2003).
This confluence of poor physical access to facilities, lack of health care, insufficient personnel and other factors creates a serious health care problem facing our state and our nation. The situation would only worsen in the event of a natural disaster, viral pandemic or terrorist attack.
We must work to counter this situation by providing more public funding for hospitals and prioritizing health care for Oregonians who still lack coverage. We need focus less on switching locations and think more about how members of our community can receive the best care.