How one Pennsylvania hospital system is navigating the coronavirus. “The Washington Health System in southwestern Pennsylvania has announced they are laying off healthcare staff due to several of their departments temporarily closing under the Gov. Tom Wolf’s state mandate that halted elective surgeries and diagnostic procedures. . . . In short, all of the routine, run-of-the-mill emergencies that community hospitals see every day dropped drastically.”
So, under the guise of “keeping us safe”, it…
Sidenote: just as a reminder, that’s not what Government is for – it’s to protect our Individual Freedom and Liberties. This is the result of bad Civics education and the continuing push of a foreign political philosophy (Socialism) that says Government must “provide” for you. Instead of, you know, following Constitutional values.
…isn’t. I look at TMEW who has been in pain for years with her knees. Her replacement surgery was supposed to be March 23 – a scheduling snafu on the doc’s part pushed it to March 4. So…
LRGH has now done the same thing – pretty much shut down the entire hospital to become nothing more than a permanent Kung Flu ward. 600 employees laid off – all elective and outpatient services shut down.
And they’ve been yammering / bleating that they are SO in debt, they have to be bailed out and they need a “partner”. For over a year or more, this nonsense has been going on”. Yet, they can spend on a big time renovation (see picture above as “necessary”), just redid their ER facilities – and blew away everything that was actually bringing in revenues. Sure, they shut down the birthing rooms – that I can understand as baby counts were going down and most of the mothers were on Medicaid that doesn’t pay the bills.
But getting rid of the elective stuff that actually was paying the bills because private insurance HAS to pay higher prices? TMEW would still be in pain but for the pushing the surgery up a coupla weeks. Given that I made sure she has a Gold Medicare Part D plan, payments have been made promptly and not as much of haircut for the hospital as I would have thought.
But layoffs galore in one of, if not the largest, employers in the area. And this is the same problem this other hospital is facing (emphasis mine, reformatted):
Pantuso said the decrease in all that volume coming in meant a significant decrease in revenue.
“We had to look at that and say, ‘How long is this going to go on, and what steps do we need to take to ensure we have the adequate resources to take care of this potential onslaught of COVID-19 patients?’ But also, that we have the essential finances maintained in place for when this crisis does resolve,” he said. Pantuso laid out why there were layoffs, their plan if and when the surge hits rural America, and how this pandemic has changed our healthcare system here in this interview. As part of our plan here to prepare ourselves for these COVID patients, we started to staff in the impacted areas who had skill sets that were transferable to other areas where they can potentially treat this surge of patients that are coming. We began training those providers, cross-training them, so that’s nurses and ancillary support staff, everybody who had a role that they could transfer.
As I had mentioned the Sister-In-Law works as Mass General as a nurse, they are doing similar things but there are no layoffs to her knowledge (that she’s passed on to me). A Boston based hospital, they are “all hands on deck”. Density can surely infect and can surely kill. Yes, LRGH and WHS are in more rural areas, but the infection rates are FAR from being the “HAIR ON FIRE” that urban areas have or are seeing.
I expect that LRGH is going to go Code Blue sometime soon from utter mismanagement. They complain about huge deb BUT THEY ARE STILL BUYING PRACTICES. In the last couple of months, two practices were bought out – one is my GP that I’ve been with for 35 years.
Now, being hospital staff, they’ve been furloughed. Docs and all.
Why would anyone want to “partner” with them? Just let it die, with a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, pull the remains out, and let some other better managed entity clean up its mess and start over. If, that is, if any of the medical staff is left in the area and not moved on to where they are wanted and needed.
(H/T: Instapundit)
