Quoted from bumblethru

There is a shortage already for hospital staff. And I think that they should all have lawn signs made up that we could all buy that says 're-open st. clares'!

Quoted from Kevin March

Only if St. Clare's is under different management than it was previously.  I have received no-so-top-notch service my last few times in St. Clare's (before the merger).  I previously said that I wouldn't go back there.  My most recent visit didn't do anything to change that view for me.

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Hospital ‘customers’ deserve voice in aftermath of merger

    I was delighted to see the July 27 Viewpoint column, “Unhealthy choice,” by Connie Ciervo.
    The whole trouble with the Berger Commission and all the decisions that had been put into action is that the people most affected by said decisions had no voice.
    All decisions were made mostly by people who have a vested interest in the decision — [CEO] James Connolly and his board of directors, as well as the board members of St. Clare’s. The boards of these hospitals have a number of doctors on them, and their decisions are also made from their experiences in these matters. They know how to work within the system.
    But who speaks for the people who will be affected by any decisions of this and the Berger Commission? No one! Many examples in the opinion pages have been written by patients or their relatives about present conditions.
    The decision to have only Ellis Hospital as the main hospital, with branches of Bellevue and St. Clare’s, was a major disservice to our community and the people who depend on the hospitals.
    Much must be done to correct this decision. Patients must be represented! People in nursing homes do have ombudsmen to whom they can complain. The ombudsman committee is under the supervision of the Red Cross. There is no such activity in hospitals. We must have ombudsmen or patient representatives in all hospitals and other places where people are cared for just like the nursing home residents.
    This patient representative idea must be set up with interested people who care to guarantee that they will be listened to and that their concerns will be addressed. Their findings should be overseen by a special department of the state Health Department. Since many patients are seniors, the state Office of Aging should be a major organization in the setting up of this patient representative department.
    I speak from experience: I have raised questions about the way several of my peers were treated, and even though I contacted both of the hospitals or their representatives, I have not had any reply. I will gladly discuss this further to bring into reality the creation of this very important and needed voice for patients in hospitals.
    Something must also be done to undo this major disservice to the community.
    HELEN QUIRINI
    Rotterdam

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Give merged hospitals time to get it right

    As a qualified observer of care in Ellis Hospital’s endoscopy unit for the past couple of years, I’d like it to be known that I think the care administered by all employees in the unit is outstanding.
    I have never seen any rushing or “inand-out” attitudes. Granted, I am only there a few hours a week as a volunteer. I was a caregiver (nurse anesthetist) myself for many years before retirement, and I wouldn’t hesitate to be a patient at Ellis.
    I understand the confusion and unhappiness of many involved in this “merger,” and, sad as it is, it must eventually work.
    ELIZABETH HANNA

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Fighting indigestion at Ellis Hospital GI unit

    We are the staff of the gastroenterology (GI) unit at Ellis Hospital. Previously we were at both Ellis and St. Clare’s hospitals. Change has been forced upon us all — changes that none of us asked for, but to which we all must adjust if we wish to continue as GI staff.
Any hospital GI unit can be a busy, rapidly changing, challenging environment. Obviously, not everyone is suited for this type of work. Our nurses and technicians who have joined together and are working together as a team are competent, high-trained and dedicated to providing the highest level of care to our patients. We, all of us, are proud of the unit we have today.
Change is always difficult. There will always be those who deal with it better than others. The GI staff at Ellis Hospital would like to assure our community that the care received here will be skilled, safe, caring and compassionate.
TERRY MARKIEWICZ MARY WYLD
Schenectady
The letter was signed by the entire staff of the Ellis GI unit.     

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Don’t take St. Clare’s decision lying down

    It is with deep sadness that I am compelled to write concerning the closing of our beloved St. Clare’s Hospital. I firmly believe that St. Clare’s was without a doubt the best Catholic hospital in New York.
    A little note of interest in this saga is that my deceased brother, Dr. Ralph Isabella, was chief of surgery at St. Clare’s for many years. Not only do I have a personal bond to St. Clare’s but also a deep family tie to the hospital.
    Dismissing the Berger Commission report as a misguided political attempt to reduce and control health care costs, I am still bewildered at how the city of Schenectady, with a population of 60,000-plus, can have only one hospital to support a population with signifi cant health-care needs. As a lifelong resident of Mont Pleasant, I am very upset with this alleged cost-saving scheme. I believe that all of those experts responsible for this mess should be held accountable. If that means voting out of office those misguided elected officials who supported the closing of St. Clare’s, or the ones who remained painfully silent, then borrow the old political phrase, “throw the bums out.”
    I urge everyone who feels how I do to band together and support Connie Ciervo [spokeswoman for Schenectady County Citizens for Hospital Choice] in her cause to fight this injustice.
    EDWARD N. ISABELLA
    Schenectady

Quoted from bumblethru

Let's face it here folks...this merger was clearly not about creating better health care. It was solely about control and money and power and greed. And the insurance companies and doctors play a major roll in this scenario as well. When the Berger commission got together to discuss health care in the state, they were not discussing yours or my health care. They were discussing 'economics'. They were discussing 'control' and who would be
best suited to be in the drivers seat. Well, Jim Connolly got the job!! It could have been Joe Blow down the street and the outcome would have
probably been the same.

This clearly has absolutely NOTHING to do about improving our health care system. It is all about who is going to accomplish and control what the
government dictates. This isn't just a Schenectady County issue....it isn't even just a NYS issue. It is a national issue.

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Ellis E.R.: Is there an emergency?

Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

    So how are things going at the Ellis Hospital emergency room these days? I mean, after all the complaints we have heard about people experiencing nightmare waits of up to 10 or 12 hours.
    Well, I don’t know from personal experience, not having had any emergencies of my own lately, but the CEO of the hospital, Jim Connolly, assures me things are getting better after the initial influx from St. Clare’s subsided somewhat.
    “Come this fall, things will be a lot better,” he said. “I won’t say the emergency room will be where we want it to be, but it will be a lot better.”
    Specifically the number of treatment areas for dealing with emergency patients, which has already increased from 22 to 34, will go up to 39. Plus, there will be more beds available for those emergency patients who need to be admitted.
    Connolly acknowledges the hospital wasn’t prepared for what happened in mid-June, when Schenectady’s other main hospital, St. Clare’s, officially went out of business and its remaining operations were taken over by Ellis. Even though St. Clare’s old emergency room remained open, funneling patients to Ellis, a lot of people apparently thought it was no longer the place to go, and if they had an emergency they went straight to Ellis.
    So Ellis wound up with more than it could handle, though the numbers don’t seem dramatic to me. Connolly tells me Ellis had been seeing about 110 emergency patients a day, and that went up to 124.
    In any event, Ellis was not prepared. “It came upon us a lot faster than we would have liked,” Connolly said, which strikes me as odd, since it was Ellis itself that engineered the takeover.
    The recommendation of the state’s Berger Commission, if you remember back to late 2006, was that Schenectady’s three hospitals reduce to one. Bellevue Woman’s Hospital was to close completely, and Ellis and St. Clare’s were to consolidate under a new parent corporation. That’s not exactly how it played out.
    Thanks largely to aggressive lobbying by Bellevue’s board chairman, Neil Golub, head of the Price Chopper supermarket chain, Bellevue managed to keep its physical plant open and operating, though it ceased to be an independent entity and became a part of Ellis. (“We won the war but lost the battle,” Golub says.)
    St. Clare’s, meanwhile, which was broke and getting broker, with $27 million in unfunded pension obligations, simply folded.
    With the approval of the state Health Department, Ellis took it over and shut down the in-patient operations, keeping some other services like imaging still functioning, and also keeping the emergency room open, with patients who needed to be hospitalized getting carted to Ellis (about 10 blocks away) by ambulance.
    Connolly says the takeover happened abruptly because St. Clare’s was in a state of financial collapse and just couldn’t continue any longer. So there were problems of transition, which have been duly reflected in the letters department of this newspaper.
    As for why St. Clare’s went bust, that is a complicated story, but a large part of it was that St. Clare’s was the hospital of choice for the uninsured and Medicaid patients of Schenectady, being closer to the poorer neighborhoods of the city, and those patients are expensive to care for. In fact, they were 46 percent of the hospital’s customers, compared with 24 percent at Ellis and a mere 12 percent at Bellevue.
    So this is not a simple story, and many people are unhappy, especially those with emotional ties to St. Clare’s, but that’s where we stand right now.

Quoted from Shadow

The bending of the truth has started.

Quoted Text

Connolly acknowledges the hospital wasn’t prepared for what happened in mid-June, when Schenectady’s other main hospital, St. Clare’s, officially went out of business and its remaining operations were taken over by Ellis.