Letters to the Editor 4-17-14

Best crowd ever
Editor: To the Sebastopol community and everyone who attended this past weekend’s Apple Blossom Festival, thank you on behalf of the Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center. Best crowd ever! We hope you had as much fun as we did.
The colorful floats, the smiles on the children’s (young and old) faces, the crafts, the art, the food, the children’s postcard art and the MUSIC.
The Bowker’s Blue Festival has been a great addition to the annual event. We felt it was one of our best years ever and we hope you did too. Thank you to our many sponsors, our awesome volunteers, to the police, Public Works and fire departments for their assistance. To the many behind the scenes “angels” who work tirelessly for no other reward but to see those happy faces and a successful outcome for their community festival.
The Sebastopol Chamber, through all the hard work and challenges we face to put this event together, is pleased to continue to do so and we look forward to this tradition. We look forward to the 69th Apple Blossom Festival (April 18 and 19, 2015) and hope you’ll send us your ideas and thoughts for next year’s event. This one will be hard to top.
The Board of the Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce and Executive Director Teresa Ramondo
Health care changes
Editor: Having lived in the West County for many years, we are saddened to see the closure of Palm Drive Hospital. Our families have received excellent care from the great staff there and we will always be grateful. As two of the members of the first Palm Drive Healthcare District Board, we are also grateful to the District Board members who, faced with a complex and difficult situation, have made the decision to take steps to close the hospital.
The health care marketplace is changing and consolidating. Small, local hospitals like ours just can’t compete for patients with the larger hospitals — rich in resources and able, with their higher patient volumes, to survive in the changing healthcare environment. And though many of us might prefer to use Palm Drive for our hospital care, that often isn’t an option based on the insurance we have. Thus, the hospital census has continued to drop and revenues to fall, leaving Palm Drive heavily in debt.
The focus of health care is changing. Medical professionals and insurers (including government) are looking for better ways to achieve good health. While hospitals will always play an important role in the health system, the emphasis and investment in health care today is shifting away from expensive tertiary care to less costly and more cost-effective approaches like primary care, outpatient services, community-based care and prevention.
So now we, as a community, have some decisions to make. With the Board’s help, we need to come together and consider our options. We have to focus our attention on determining “what kinds of services does our community need now, and in the future?” We need to listen carefully to the community, look for successful models in other communities, and seek out expertise that can help us create a new vision.
We believe Palm Drive has a future and that there are many kinds of services that could be offered which would be of tremendous benefit to the West County including urgent care, diagnostics, outpatient procedures, chronic disease management, physical therapy, hospice, senior services, behavioral health and many others.
We also have confidence that the District Board, with the help of the community, can assemble a plan for a package of health services that will meet the needs of the community and keep the District in the black; a package of services that will be utilized and valued by the people who live in our district.
Palm Drive is a tremendous community asset that we can use to improve the health and wellbeing for everyone in the West County. That’s a future we can all believe in.
Barbara Graves, retired, Sonoma County Department of Health Services
Mary Szecsey, Executive Director,
West County Health Centers
Small Palm Drive pledges
Editor: We have been Kaiser members since 1964, when our union, then the San Francisco-Oakland Newspaper Guild negotiated a health plan with the SF-Oakland publishers. We don’t intend to drop our Kaiser memberships.
But we believe strongly in the need to maintain urgent/emergency services here. For the people in Sebastopol, and on the coast, an increase in an emergency journey of 15 minutes for care in the event of a stroke or heart attack or severe accident-caused trauma makes the difference between life and death. And we never know when that “100 year” flood or an earthquake will close access from Sebastopol to a Santa Rosa medical facility.
We thank and appreciate those who can make contributions of thousands of dollars. Not everyone can do this. We live on Social Security benefits and small pensions, but pledge to contribute $350 and work toward a ballot measure to double the present parcel tax of $155 that helps support Palm Drive Hospital. We urge everyone in West County to examine their budgets and prioritize a contribution to whichever entity is appropriate to sustain emergency/urgent care services in Sebastopol. It’s worth our lives and the lives of our neighbors.
Fred Fletcher and Helen Shane
Sebastopol
Broken eggs
Editor: I worked at Palm Drive in the early ‘90s when it was owned and operated by Columbia/HCA, a huge national health care company. I worked nights as a LVN and was a “Med-Surg” nurse taking care of elderly patients.
I was also a patient when I blew out my right knee at the end of 2008. Dr. Michael Bollinger did the surgical repair, assisted by an extremely well trained OR staff of nurses. When I awoke they medicated me and made it possible for me to go home the same day. The point is that a doctor does not just snap his or her fingers and assemble the right staff of assistants. It takes time.
I was also a patient in rehab in Physical Therapy for about the next three months. This of course involves more highly trained, caring, professional staff of physical therapists. If Palm Drive Hospital closes, every one of these hard working folks will be gone in a week or so, probably never to return.
I write all this to simply make the point that once the hospital closes, all these fine staff members in PT and throughout the hospital will have to go elsewhere to work. You can break an egg, but all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never put it together again.
So let’s get behind our hospital one more time. Support the docs’ plan. Don’t let them close Palm Drive.
Frank Baumgardner
Santa Rosa