Valley Views: Despite center closing, St. Francis is dedicated to Beacon

By Robert Savage
 

Savage

We at St. Francis Hospital have reluctantly decided to close the Medical Walk-In Center at our Beacon campus at the end of the month. The closure is necessitated by the economic realities of the health-care industry.

The issue is that we cannot keep paid physicians at the site to supervise the wonderful employees who are presently providing the care. We are not abandoning the health needs of the community. St. Francis Hospital has arranged for a general practitioner to begin providing services at the site. We will continue to talk with other physicians who may be interested in practicing medicine in Beacon and who will supplement the five other existing practices or clinics in the area.

The Medical Walk-In Center at the Beacon campus is the only St. Francis Hospital service being discontinued. The others, such as the laboratory and radiology departments, will continue to serve the community.

To some it may seem cold to admit we are closing the center's doors out of financial considerations. But that's the reality of the situation. It's another example of the underlying problems that government and the nation's health-care industry, not individual hospitals like ours, must solve.

St. Francis Hospital annually provides more than $7 million in services to the community for which we are not compensated. To maintain this growing level of care we cannot continue the Walk-In Center, in which we lose on the vast majority of cases. Any prudent businessperson would say an organization cannot continue a service when it loses on virtually every case. Certainly there is no motivation to increase the volume.

A reasonable question is: Why can't something be done? The unfortunate answer is that payers of health-care services want something different. Reasonably, HMOs and insurers want people to have a primary care physician who establishes a relationship with patients, who knows and understands the patient's history and pertinent family issues and who provides continuity of care.

In the mid-Hudson Valley these payers do not impanel or authorize non-physician providers for payment for services provided. Those insurers that will pay for nurse practitioners pay at a much lower rate.

Supervisors necessary

Many of us have been treated by nurse practitioners or physicians' assistants, and therefore, we see this as an excellent way to get services in a crowded health-care delivery system. The reason this works is that these ''physician extenders'' are directly supervised by a physician who is ultimately responsible for the decisions surrounding the care. Our Medical Walk-In Center has excellent nurse practitioners, but we cannot keep physicians available for the required supervisory time the clinic is open.

We feel the answer is more physicians in private practice, and we are working on it.

The center's staff showed tremendous dedication to St. Francis Hospital's mission and commitment to our patients. Our Human Resources Department will work closely with them to assist them in seeking other employment within and outside of St. Francis Hospital.

I mentioned earlier that St. Francis Hospital is not abandoning Beacon or the southern Dutchess community. Proof is the planned major expansion of the Special Needs Preschool program in response to the growing need for services in southern Dutchess and northern Putnam counties. St. Francis Hospital will build a new 6,500-square-foot facility on the hospital's Beacon campus for the Special Needs Preschool and Communication Disorders Program.

We offer the only hospital-based special needs program for children ages 3 to 5 in the mid-Hudson Valley and are the largest provider for such services, with locations in Beacon and Hyde Park and two sites in Poughkeepsie.

Again, it is with reluctance that we announce the closing of the Beacon Medical Walk-In Center. It's a decision that was given much thought.