Letter to the editor...."Let's Do It Danville!"

To the editor:
Much has been said and written regarding our local hospital having been sold to LifePoint Hospitals Inc. without any citizen input. The hospital has been a good institution, with the exception of some cases.
For example, every hospital emergency department in America has a problem with large numbers of people using it instead of seeing their physicians during the day.
Many doctors will not see patients who have no insurance or are on Medicaid - or they are just not accepting any new patients. This greatly expands the number of local citizens who must utilize the emergency department for children with snotty noses, colds and other non-emergency problems.
Obviously, this makes for a long wait for all.
Patients with apparent heart attacks, accident victims and other true emergencies must obviously be seen prior to families with children who have colds and have brought a van load of family members to take up huge amounts of space in the waiting room. Routinely, they seem to be the most vocal citizens making complaints because they had to wait so long - and they don’t care about the actual emergency victims.
I became extremely dizzy at work at Moses Cones Hospital two years ago and ended up in the emergency room there for 12 hours.
I waited in the emergency room from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. as assessments, X-rays, lab tests, etc. were completed, read by the emergency room physicians, consulting doctors were called in, more assessments were done, more lab tests done, CT scans were done, read and reported back to consulting doctors, etc. in a seemingly endless series of doctor visits while waiting on a hard gurney.
At 9 p.m., a bed was finally open to accommodate my admission. So, long emergency room waits are not limited to Danville Regional, as many people seem to think.
Every hospital emergency room in America has long waits, perhaps rude nursing and doctor staffs (because they are overworked) and perhaps the patient must be transferred to another hospital for more sophisticated treatment.
I have noticed many local citizens complain about everything in Danville by saying “Danville isn’t this or that,” “Danville doesn’t have this or that compared to Greensboro, N.C. or Roanoke,” or “This little town has too much traffic.” The traffic would greatly increase if Danville had all “this or that” which they complain about to this newspaper.
I have spent time as an inpatient in the local hospital and would recommend Danville Regional Medical Center to anyone who has a medical condition that can be treated at this level. This hospital is not Duke University Medical Center, Baptist Medical Center, or UVA Medical Center. It is not designed to be such. It is a local hospital which does a great job, as a whole, with patients it is designed to treat.
Since LifePoint has bought out Danville Regional, we have experienced many complications in the community, with complaints regarding cutbacks in nursing staff due to LifePoint cutting expenses, in addition to administrations which weren’t listening to those complaints or had their hands tied by corporate decisions made in another state. We have had three or four administrators (I’ve lost count), all of whom have said there is light at the end of the tunnel.
During the recently televised meeting with Danville City Council, the current administrator would not answer the question about the ratio of nursing staff to patients. Some of the medical staff quickly wrote letters to this newspaper in regards to the nurse-patient ratio, which was a very simple question. This type of bull dust stance by the chief officer of Danville Regional simply makes matters worse in the community.
I agree with Coy Harville, we can literally take the damn hospital back from LifePoint and tell the local bank executives, etc., who made the decision to sell out the local community to drop dead and can be kicked out of decision-making positions.
In my opinion, our local hospital can be returned to its former self with enough citizens simply making the decision to do so. So, let’s quit whining and actually do something!
DAVID
-Danville