My local hospital has been petitioning the local city zoning board for permission to build an on-site parking garage for years now. The city zoning board is very strict about the height of buildings and has turned the requests down repeatedly.
This past fall, the hospital administration announced that it needed a capital partner to expand and stay solvent. Most of the members of the hospital medical staff have absolutely no idea if this is true and accurate or not. We do know that several weeks after agreeing to a relationship with a well-respected health care system as a capital partner, they received permission to build that garage.
Construction is set to begin in March, so it was no surprise to receive a three-page email announcement that physician parking has been moved from adjacent to the hospital to an area that will make it significantly easier for me to get my daily 10,000 steps in. The construction will take a year. Florida’s sudden onset of torrential downpours will present a challenge but, that’s what umbrellas are for.
I bring this up after making rounds on my affluent patient, whose hospital identification information identifies him as a VIP benefactor with a yellow star, upstairs in the spectacular VIP section known as the Rockwell Suites. The operators have gotten used to us staff members calling in and asking the operator to connect us to the nursing station at the Rock and Roll Suites.
His room is the size of three to four rooms with dark wood paneled floors and walls. There are three big-screen TVs in this room along with two computer screens. The floor has its own chef available to make a meal for a patient or family member any time of the day or night. There is a surcharge for this type of room not covered by insurance.
When I left this patient’s room, and had adjusted his medications at the nursing station, I went downstairs to the general medical telemetry floor. My patient on that floor also is a benefactor but is in a semiprivate room being evaluated for a fainting episode. I reached up behind his bed for a blood pressure cuff to check his blood pressure in various positions, and there was none. I walked out to the nursing desk and asked the charge nurse for a blood pressure cuff and, after five minutes of going from room to room, she found one that didn’t hold the pressure load and was not working very well. A digital one was finally located so I could measure the patient’s blood pressure myself.
My community hospital was built by neighbors and philanthropic donations after two young children died of a poison ingestion and there was no local hospital to bring them to. It was controlled by a lay community board, a community medical staff that represented the patient’s through the physician staff and a separate administration. Addition of new doctors to the staff required the approval of a lay community council that first looked at the need for that specialty based on the population and the number of existing doctors already here practicing that specialty. They were concerned that too many doctors would lead to many unnecessary tests because everyone needed to generate income.
That community hospital is now a “regional “hospital with a board filled by CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and doctors who are employed by the hospital. The pediatrics wing has been closed down because it lost money. There is no geriatrics wing despite a plethora of senior citizens. There is little or no relationship with the student health programs at the two local universities. There are no blood pressure cuffs in most rooms and no otoscopes or ophthalmoscopes in most rooms in the emergency department. But, there are three big screen TVs in the Rock and Roll Suites and a parking garage in the works.
I wonder who now represents the health and medical needs of our community?
Steven Reznick is an internal medicine physician and can be reached at Boca Raton Concierge Doctor.
Image credit: Shutterstock.com
