BY KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock

Well, I guess most of you have heard–with Los Alamos Medical Center managing to put a really positive spin on their abject failure–they are “transitioning” to a “regional” labor and delivery “model” as they close off the maternity portion of our ever-shrinking hospital.  

Well, LAMC, you can put lipstick on it until a very hot place gets cold, but the bottom line is that what should be a healthy, functioning hospital IN OUR COMMUNITY has done nothing but shrink for decades. The only “growth” effort I have seen over the last 35 years was in 1991 when you demolished a bunch of badly needed AFFORDABLE apartments by the hospital, to (in the words of the 1970s song) put up a parking lot!

Bottom line, for years local people managed our medical center well. But it’s a new era and we need to get passed a FAILED management system that seems to know nothing other than, “Well, that isn’t working. Let’s shut it down,” perhaps illustrative of a town full of scientists, rather than entrepreneurs and certainly not people skilled in hospital management or growing our hospital.

Also, it’s time for the lab to HONESTLY disclose to potential new-hires that, no, there isn’t really serious medical care in Los Alamos–for you, your family, or even your pets if your fur baby has a crisis after hours.  It’s also time for our Lost Almost County Council to give half the attention to our failing business district and our FAILING hospital that they do to sucking up to whatever pressure group or lobby, such as the bicycle lobby or telling us we can’t have gas stoves.

Where, for example, was our county council in persuading Presbyterian to locate in the Atomic City, rather than Espanola?  Where are they to lead to say, “Okay. The current management of LAMC is failing.  How do we find a professional management company that knows how to run a hospital so that it will meet our community’s needs and know how to GROW OUR HOSPITAL so that, perhaps, it might someday be a huge Level One Trauma Center like Farmington and Durango, have, rather than a pile of bricks near Omega West Bridge that is little more than a glorified office building?

As one poster on Nextdoor put it, it seems you can die in Los Alamos, but you can’t be born here.  Actually, I’m pretty worried about a hospital so failed, I won’t even be able to die here!