WILLIAMSTON, N.C. (AP) — Weeds have punctured the empty parking lot of Martin General Hospital’s emergency room. A makeshift blue tarp covering the hospital sign is frayed from flapping in the wind. The hospital doors are locked and many in this county of 22,000 inhabitants are in constant fear.
Some residents fear that the hospital sudden closing last August could cost them their lives.
“I know we all have to die, but it seems like since the hospital closed, there are a lot more people dying,” Linda Gibson, a longtime resident of Williamston, North Carolina, said on a recent afternoon as she prepared snacks for children. at a restaurant. nearby elementary school kitchen.
More than 100 hospitals reduced services or closed completely over the past decade in rural communities like Williamston, where people openly wonder whether they would survive the 25-minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital if they were in a serious car accident.
When Quorum Health closed Martin County’s 43-bed hospital, citing “financial challenges related to declining population and utilization trends,” residents here didn’t just lose their sense of security. They have also lost trust in the leaders they elected to make their city a better place to live.
People like 73-year-old Bobby Woolard say they don’t believe any politician — from the local commissioners to the presidential candidates who will be sweeping through this swing state with big campaign promises in the coming months — cares enough to help them solve the problem. problem. problem.
“If you’re seriously ill, there’s no help for you here,” Woolard said on a sunny April afternoon as he trimmed his neighbor’s hedges. “Nobody seems to care. You have an empty building and no one seems to care.
PROBLEMS FOR BIDEN’S HEALTH CARE CAMPAIGN?
The sentiment in this sharply polarized and segregated eastern North Carolina county could hint at trouble for the president Joe Bidenwho has health care a key part of his re-election campaign against Republican rival Donald Trump.
His campaign’s TV ads focus on Trump’s promises to scale back the Affordable Care Act. On social media, Biden regularly reminds followers of the law he signed that caps the cost of insulin. And in North Carolina, the campaign focuses narrowly on promoting Democrats’ successful efforts to expand Medicaidwhich will extend nearly free government health insurance to thousands of people and reduce the destitute hospital population.
Biden and Trump are competing fiercely for the state, which also features the most prominent gubernatorial race of the year. Martin County, where Williamston is located, voted for Trump in 2020.
“Healthcare is on the ballot this year, and voters will remember that when they reject Donald Trump in November,” said Dory MacMillan, communications director for the Biden campaign in North Carolina.
But Biden’s achievements may not be enough for crucial voters who live in towns like this one in North Carolina, where people have difficulty getting emergency care when they need it.
Nationally, emergency room wait times have increased, with the average emergency room visit taking nearly three hours last year, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Health systems are also facing a health problem shortage of workers which worsened after burnt-out employees emerged from the pandemic.
These problems are particularly pronounced in rural communities, where more than 68 hospitals have closed in the last decade. Closures slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic as the federal government distributed billions of dollars in extra funding to hospitals. But with that money spent, hospital closures could rise again, said George Pink, deputy director of the Rural Health Research Program at the University of North Carolina Sheps Center.
It’s often the emergency care that residents miss most, Pink said.
“If you’re having a heart attack, if you’re having a stroke, if you’re giving birth, these are all the types of life events where you need access to emergency care quickly and appropriately,” Pink said. “Communities that lost their rural hospitals don’t have them.”
A SYSTEM ‘AT RISK’
Months before the Williamston hospital closed, an outside consultant sent a dire warning about emergency care in the county.
The county’s volunteer first aid system was ineffective and long response times, exceeding 15 minutes in some areas, put “lives at risk.” the consultant told county commissioners last April.
The system “desperately needed vision, direction, guidance, command and control, and additional financial support,” the consultant told the county, according to meeting minutes.
Since Martin General Hospital closed, things have only gotten worse.
Longer trips to hospitals outside the county mean ambulances and their crews are stuck for hours, sometimes rushing, said Capt. Kenny Warren of Williamston Fire and Rescue.
“A call that used to take 20 to 30 minutes is now taking an hour to two hours, depending on where we have to be transported,” Warren said. He added that the agency has emergency medical technicians but not paramedics trained to provide more advanced care to patients in emergencies.
Warren, however, said he doesn’t think anyone died as a result.
“Most of the results probably would have been the same anyway,” he said.
In December, first responders arrived on a Williamston street three minutes after receiving 911 calls that multiple shots had been fired and that a young man might be dead.
They tried unsuccessfully to get a medical helicopter to transport the 21-year-old gunshot victim. The closest option was a six-bed hospital, 21 minutes away by ambulance. In all, it would take 34 minutes from the time of the 911 call to get him there, according to police dispatch records. He was transferred from that hospital to a higher-level trauma center, where he died a few days later.
The location of the shooting was just four minutes from the Martin General Hospital site.
‘DO YOU REALLY CARE?’
More than a dozen Williamston residents interviewed for this story blamed the Martin County Board of Commissioners for failing to prevent the closure of the troubled hospital.
Last month, Williamston resident Verna Perry told commissioners that her sister drove 25 minutes to the nearest hospital and discovered she couldn’t get the treatment she needed there.
“Do you really care, commissioners?” Perry asked. “If you cared, you would do something to get a hospital here.”
Kaitlyn Paxton was seeking treatment for her asthma in the emergency room at Martin General Hospital the day it closed. She watched as staff carried patients on stretchers to transfer them to other hospitals.
Since then, she has had difficulty finding primary care doctors and specialists to replace those who left after the hospital closed.
“As far as doctors and daily appointments, from my personal experience, it’s been a nightmare trying to find someone,” she said.
She used the federally qualified health center called Agape Health, which is one of the few facilities in the county that still offers primary care. More more than a thousand of these health centers operate throughout the US. They receive funding from the federal government and accept patients on a sliding pay scale regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay.
Agape Health added Saturday hours because of an influx of new patients after Martin General closed, said clinic CEO Dr. Last month, Agape reopened one of the orthopedic clinics it closed along with the hospital.
McDuffie wants to reopen Martin General next, even if just as a stand-alone emergency room.
“It could mean life or death,” McDuffie said. “They need an emergency department here so that can at least stabilize them.”
The county, which still owns the hospital and land, is consulting with state officials and representatives from federal Health and Human Services agencies to determine whether the facility can reopen as a Rural Emergency Hospital, said interim county manager Ben Eisner. Governor Roy Cooper helped inaugurate a new State Law that allows rural North Carolina hospitals to transition.
The Rural Emergency Hospital program was developed by Congress, signed into law by Trump and refined by the Biden administration. The designation allows rural hospitals to unlock millions of federal dollars and increase Medicare payments if they remain open to provide 24/7 emergency care.
“The simple question we are trying to answer is how to move from closed to open in a way that makes sense for the citizens of Martin County,” Eisner said.
If successful, Martin County would be the first hospital in the country to reopen its doors after closing under the new federal designation.
“It’s a top priority for us, we live it every day as a community,” Paxton said of the hospital’s reopening. It will be a priority for her when she votes in the presidential election this fall.
Still, she said, “I don’t think it’s a top priority for any of them — president, senators — any of them.”
