BY KATHLEENE PARKER
White Rock
As it rushes to welcome the new Christus St. Vincent facility, I hope Los Alamos isn’t repeating the mistakes it made rushing to welcome Smith’s Marketplace.
New Mexico is awash in out-of-state-owned “corporate” medicine, I believe the reason for our appallingly poor healthcare. Are we going to ask hard questions and demand correct answers, questions such as:
- Los Alamos Medical Center offers one of the best E.D.s in a state rife with E.D.’s that provide often poor care. Will the new St. Christus facility drive LAMC E.D. out of business, leaving St. Christus with a monopoly in town? Why should we believe St. Christus will even try to rise to LAMC’s quality of care?
- Will we demand that St. Christus’ new E.D. provides triage done only by medical professionals, not administrative staff serving more as barriers to care than expeditors of care as patients wait hours to be seen even when there’s no evidence of a busy E.D.?
- Will they demand guarantees that when specialists decide to leave the area that sick patients aren’t left in limbo with no help in finding another doctor?
- Will they demand guarantees that if St. Christus depicts a doctor is a specialist, that he/she has credentials in that field and is current in that discipline to the highest national standards?
- Will St. Christus offer a patient advocate to address complaints, rather than staff offering a glazed look, a bored shrug and the old, “Well, you might try calling so and so” approach to patient complaints?
New Mexico has arrived at the happy—and wrong—conclusion that our only problem is a doctor shortage.
But the real problem is a shortage of qualified, highly trained doctors in a venue where “corporate” is solely and constantly focused on providing only the finest medical “product” possible. Will the new St. Christus facility be that?