I am a retired healthcare professional who’s resided in Sussex County for 28 years. As we are aware, the demographics of our county have changed significantly. Our community has many well-educated, professional people who have retired here from areas that are larger and more progressive in some circumstances. The expectations around healthcare are now different. The bar has been raised.
We are also within a relatively short distance of Philadelphia, D.C., and Baltimore with their many healthcare systems.
I have heard the chatter about our local care and experienced issues myself related to the inability of our local systems to try to accommodate an exploding and educated population. The word is that folks are keeping their healthcare providers from their home area; they are traveling out of our local area to have their needs met in a satisfactory manner. Some of this could be perception, but perception is reality.
I have a friend who is 86 years old and needs an aortic valve replacement. She was informed that it would be months until this procedure could be done because she is 16th on the list. She cannot breathe effectively, and this is significantly impacting her quality of life. This issue has nothing to do with the quality of the providers, but with the system.
This writer's opinion concerns the duplication of services. Healthcare is very complex, and there are many moving targets, regulations and patient expectations.
Sussex County is not that large. Why do we have the same services at each hospital? How much more efficient and cost-saving would it be if we had one Center of Excellence for Cardiac Care? One Center of Excellence for Rehabilitation? Every hospital is trying to compete for market share, so every service that is introduced is set up to be provided at every hospital. If people will travel back to their homes in D.C., they will surely travel to one Center of Excellence in the county.
The duplication of equipment, staff and overhead for these many services drives the prices up, and access to care is not improved. This manner of operating doesn't seem to be sustainable. As one facility fights to develop a state-of-the-art center for cancer care, another is duplicating efforts a few miles down the road.
If we are concerned with care and disease prevention for the entire county, why not turn one of the closed facilities into a homeless center? Let’s proactively prevent diseases such as pneumonia or the flu by providing adequate food and housing for our compromised populations. The result of no care is that they end up in the ER with an acute crisis that could have been prevented, ultimately costing much more in dollars and quality of life.
We must make a paradigm shift, or we will continue to struggle with lost opportunities as folks seek care from where they perceive safety, reliability and access.
We could be doing better. If we are proactive, we can have a county with exceptional, cost-effective care that is also accessible.
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