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accessHealthNews.net
January 2022
Volume 8 | Issue No. 53
Y
ou can hear the rattle in Pat's chest
when she breathes. "Can you hear it?"
journalist Sarah Jane Tribble, narrator of the
Where it Hurts podcast, asks. "No, I don't hear
it anymore," Pat said. "It's been too many
years. I have emphysema. That's what I'm
dying from, that's why I'm losing weight."
Emphysema is a condition in which the lungs'
air sacs are damaged and enlarged, causing
breathlessness.
Pat tells Tribble that when she looks at herself,
she sees her dad, who also lost a lot of weight
and died from a heart attack. She said it's
difficult to eat or do much of anything. "It was
a nice cushion knowing that the hospital was
here if we needed it."
Mercy Hospital gave the Fort Scott, Kansas
community a sense of place and safety. But it
takes more than that to keep the lights on and
the doors open. Unmerciful: The Ripple Effects
of One Rural Hospital Closure is the first of this
two-part accessHealth News series. It covers
a portion of the Where it Hurts podcast that
chronicles the collateral damage caused by
the closing of Mercy Hospital. It also touched
on the challenges cancer patients endure to
get sometimes simple but necessary treatments
when specialty care is no longer accessible
close to home. This article follows with stories
about some of the people -- who live and who
have died -- after Mercy closed its doors and
offers a glimpse of how the community fares
now.
The hospital had been in the red for years
before it closed in 2018. Tribble, who covered
the hospital's closing and the impact it had
on the Fort Scott community, said the number
of patients dropped every year. In December
of 2018, three weeks before Christmas, there
wasn't a single patient in a hospital bed.
Tribble wanted to know if rural communities
were still served well by an "old, traditional
model of a hospital that was big in the 1950s?"
Or was there a different way to serve the
continuum of health needs of rural Americans?
And if there's no hospital, [what] is necessary to
create a healthy community that thrives?
PRIMARY CARE
As for Pat, she made peace with Mercy's
closing, just as she made peace with her own
mortality, and that of her husband Ralph.
He was dying of emphysema, too. What she
couldn't square was the fact that she was
denied Medicaid because Ralph had worked
at a factory for years and made a good
pension, albeit not great, but just enough to
get by.
For Pat, Ralph, and many others Tribble
encountered as she covered Mercy Hospital's
closing, there was a common denominator
that each person benefited from – primary
care.
"When a hospital decides to close its doors or close its maternity
ward, the risks that are associated with potential emergencies or
medical needs, they don't go away with the hospital. They stay in
that community, and they stay with the individuals and families who
have to sit around and come up with a plan."
