When the University of Maryland undertook the business of acquiring properties and setting up shop on the Eastern Shore, it did so with a business model riddled with septic flaws and misconceptions that patients and other ordinary humans should not have to endure.
The burden for supporting rural medical care has always fallen on the state and ultimately the federal government, as do the needs of dependencies like Samoa and Puerto Rico…Arizona needs water piped in and oranges don’t grow in Minnesota, The current game plan treats health-care services here like a commodity, and that is a flawed measure for an intangible.
The best that modern medicine is offered and withdrawn at the whim and will of an unrealistic profit model, that presumes capacities quite beyond the economic realities and cultural/professional infrastructure of rural areas. The Eastern Shore is an agrarian society, modest in economic development and quite needy if compared to the greater community of Maryland ‘s populous Western Shore. Exporting technology to the Shore is no guarantee that the transplant will work, particularly on such a short leash with such a fickle mooring.
So the Eastern Shore is not a candidate for a self-sustaining, fee-based structure in the usual sense, without some subsidy, particularly for young physicians to locate here.
Surrounded as we are by media and paved connections to healthcare technology, there is no guarantee or even reasonable assurance that a woman will safely have her baby. And that is what this is all about. Cut and transport is plan B and won’t work humanely.
The University needs to take better care of its client service constituency, and find another model more sophisticated than just simple supply and demand, tempering patient healthcare by sacrifice. There are just too many escape hatches, so the University of Maryland can avoid rather than fulfill. Closing down OBGYN services comes to mind.
In the short run, it is a matter of geography, delivery logistics, and a more realistic game plan that will match the integrity expected from the state educational institution. Acquiring our medical center is an initiative, not just a purchase.
Stephan Sonn says
Today I was told today that blaming
the business plan and UMMC
for the present OB-GYN problem
at Chester River Healthcare
was a shallow take on my part.
Blaming the doctor is another dead end.
Blaming rural considerations is too abstract.
But the comment was made that second generation trust babies
on the board chose profit over charity. Now they have a piece of the profit
instead writing a check, having dinner and getting a bronze bust.
Which all all points to the consolidated medical center in construction
on Route 50. The consolation prize being a
first class medical facility on the Eastern Shore
So business is business, and that is the price of progress I suppose.