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General News: Village Plans to Share Hospital Concerns
August 19, 2009
St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital (SLCH) will be on the agenda if the Cornwall-on-Hudson trustees follow through on their decision to pass a resolution asking the hospital to maintain its emergency services at the Cornwall branch.
The topic came up at the end of Monday’s board meeting when John Donnellan, a concerned resident, asked the trustees why they haven’t followed the lead set by the town of Cornwall, which sent a letter to St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital to protest the reduction of patient beds in the facility. Changes at the hospital will not affect the newly renovated emergency room but the intensive care unit has been closed down and the number of patient beds reduced from 36 to 17. These changes are occurring as the hospital gets ready to open a new cancer care facility, part of its shift from inpatient to outpatient services.
Mayor Joseph Gross told Donnellan that he hadn’t acted to protest the changes because he didn’t think the hospital was within the jurisdiction of the village. The trustees discussed the need for emergency care at the Cornwall branch of the hospital and agreed that they would draft a letter to hospital officials asking them to maintain emergency services for the care of people transported to the local facility.
In an interview last month that included a tour of the renovated emergency room, SLCH vice president Sue Sullivan said that when a patient arrives at the hospital for medical care, emergency room and staff physicians will evaluate the patient to determine what level of care is needed, and then treat him or her onsite in Cornwall, in Newburgh, or even at the trauma center at Westchester Medical. New technology, Sullivan said, allows for a sophisticated level of patient care in any hospital bed, eliminating the need for an intensive care unit.
Donnellan, who said that his life was saved at Cornwall hospital, noted that other Cornwall residents oppose the reduction in beds at the hospital and he said petitions protesting the move are circulating.
Comments:
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Shame on you Sullivan. You should know that an ICU consists of more than the bed and technology. Why not tell the people of Cornwall where the majority of your experienced ICU staff is now working... Or the cost that will be incurred by the patients when they need ambulance transport to another facility because Cornwall cant handle the acuity. As an ICU and ER nurse for 11 years I serously hope that the Admin of SLCH comes out of their offices to actually access what the community needs are....
posted by Katherine Santiago on 08/22/09 at 10:28 AM
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