Patients Still Showing Up at Florida Hospital's Shut Doors
The county has kept an ambulance parked at the hospital to stabilize any patients who might show up.
For 10 days and counting, Gadsden Community Hospital has been quiet, its utilities shut off and its normally busy emergency room empty. At the entrance to the ER, where no one could be turned away before the closing, a sheriff's deputy stands guard, keeping the unauthorized out.
Calling it a risk to public health, the state closed the hospital to patients Nov. 4. But the closure of the hospital carries its own risks for residents of the poor, rural county who count on the hospital for care.
"We've had several patients pull up and had to initiate care and take them to Tallahassee," said Brian Beasley, director of the county's emergency medical service. Those patients included a man with a fractured leg and a boy with breathing trouble.
The county has kept an ambulance parked at the hospital around the clock since the hospital's closure to stabilize any patients who might show up at the emergency room. No one's life has been directly threatened, Beasley said, but that additional 30-minute trip to can make a critical difference in an emergency situation.
And with just four remaining full-time ambulances, the additional time spent transporting patients outside of the county leaves emergency coverage thin. With sirens blaring, it can still take an hour to get from the west edge of the county to Tallahassee.
"It's getting to the point now where I might possibly have to add another ambulance," Beasley said.
The most critical emergency cases, however, are just part of the concern. As the number of days without a hospital stack up, Gadsden County residents who have come to rely on the hospital as their primary health-care provider are forced to find other places to treat their illnesses, take needed tests and get medicine.
Last year, the hospital logged 13,640 emergency room visits or about 37 people a day. There were 341 acute-care admissions and 179 less-serious inpatients, with an average of four of the hospital's 25 beds filled each day. More than 95 percent of those admitted in 2004 depended on Medicaid, Medicare or have no health-care insurance at all.
The hospital's closure couldn't have come at a worse time of year.
"This is the busiest time of the year for us, cold and flu season is starting," said Jon McCarthy, a paramedic who worked in Gadsden's emergency room for the past four years. "We see a lot of clinic-type stuff. ... These patients aren't necessarily dying, but they are going to go to places to be seen."
The effect of the hospital closure has begun to be felt at other hospitals. Tallahassee Memorial Hospital is so far seeing anywhere from three to seven additional Gadsden County residents a day in its emergency room, said hospital spokesman Warren Jones.
"We are using available resources to deal with it at this point," Jones said.
No emergency room can turn patients away, but simply getting to Tallahassee can be a challenge. Many poor Gadsden County residents don't have cars. If they are transported by ambulance, they must figure out how to get back home.
"Transportation is a big problem in Gadsden County, and it makes it even harder to get to health care," said Dr. Jessie Furlow, who has practiced medicine in the county since 1982.
Her concern grows with each day the hospital remains shuttered.
"It's a huge loss to the community," Furlow said.
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