This is in response to “Serving the West Side’s medical needs” (Voice of the people, July 1).
In his letter to the editor, Rev. Lewis Flowers, chairman of the Westside Ministers Coalition, did a gross disservice to our community when he said that full-service operations are not needed at Bethany Hospital.
Flowers claimed that West Siders were harmed when the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board rejected Advocate Health Care’s attempt to close Bethany’s mental-health unit and obstetrics-gynecological services.
Precisely the opposite is true:
By preventing Advocate from withdrawing vital resources from Bethany, the board served the welfare of our community–and we are very thankful.
There is still large demand in the community for Bethany’s mental-health services. For instance hospitalization rates on the West Side are twice the city average for mental illness and four times as high for substance abuse.
Yet under its plan for Bethany, Advocate would have gutted the services that treat patients struggling with those afflictions.
And for all the talk about the dire need for long-term care on the West Side, the president of Bethany Hospital admitted to state regulators that the hospital is now filling an average of only 20 long-term care beds per day–only one-quarter of the beds it has available. That pretty much debunks Advocate’s rationale for attempting to convert Bethany into a long-term-care facility exclusively.
Bethany’s “emergency room” no longer accepts ambulance service and no longer has a physician on duty.
In fact it is no longer even called an “emergency room.”
Advocate has renamed the facility “prompt care,” and during public testimony earlier this year, a company executive likened the service provided there to “first-aid.”
Most cynically, Advocate has reneged on its promise to provide the West Side with a community health fund, further demonstrating its indifference to the needs of our distressed neighborhoods.
My community needs general acute-care hospital services, not specialty-care services that are inaccessible to low-income, uninsured patients, who are all too prevalent on the West Side. We need a community hospital that is part of a large, financially stable system–a system such as Advocate.
Too many of our community hospitals operate on the financial precipice between solvency and bankruptcy, without the safety net that a wealthy corporate giant such as Advocate Health Care can provide to Bethany.
Thankfully, in rejecting Advocate’s proposed cuts at Bethany, state regulators effectively told the company “over my dead body.”
Otherwise it literally might have been over our dead bodies.
