I raise concern about the shrinking availability of services at Mercy Hospital (formerly Mercy Regional Medical Center). Pre-Centura, there was certainly greater availability at Mercy of urology, cardiology and gastroenterology services, to name a few. But, Centura makes more money this way – piling ever more clinical and support work on fewer and fewer clinical and support workers. Good looking spreadsheets come of it.
It is bad enough when you consider the situation as it relates to a community, but it gains a certain poignancy when it threatens someone close to you. On Thursday, my wife suffered five deep punctures in her foot from a cat bite, which immediately became red, swollen and extremely painful. The emergency room doctor suspected Pasturella infection. Pasturella causes plague. I’m a pathologist and plague gets my attention.
By the weekend, despite antibiotics, her foot remained angry, red and swollen. A surgeon friend examined my wife’s foot and rightly raised the concern that development of infection spreading along fascial planes would necessitate emergent foot and ankle surgery.
Needless to say, Mercy Centura recently “lost” its foot and ankle surgeon – a particular loss now hitting very close to home. All I have to say is that I wish I had as much faith and trust in Centura businessmen to allocate resources (human and otherwise) to a community they supposedly serve, as I have in our fine health care workers to provide us with their care.
But I don’t.
Charles Masters
Durango
