Published: July 15, 2008 10:45 pm         

Plenty at stake

Region needs the chance to expand health care access

Gov. Joe Manchin will decide sometime Friday whether proposed revisions for cardiac catheterization services in West Virginia hospitals are adequate enough to meet the needs of the state’s citizenry.

For a large segment of the state, the changes appear to address not only the matter of access, but the wants of hospitals eager to expand heart services.

Then comes southern West Virginia, sadly to say, peering in once again from the outside.

A few weeks back. Raleigh General Hospital administrators spoke with us about their desire to take advantage of the state-of-the-art heart facilities they have put in place to not only help them attract interventional cardiologists, but to allow them to expand and offer the regional public a choice about where they can get timely heart treatment closer to home.

RGH chief executive officer Karen Bowling referred to it as “the gold standard” of care.

We believe it is imperative that RGH, the region’s leader when it comes to in-patient and out-patient visits, be afforded the chance to apply for a certificate of need to operate a full scale catheterization facility without a cloud hovering overhead because it is considered to be within a one-hour drive of Charleston Area Medical Center (CAMC), a hospital already performing those procedures.

There will be many who will debate you on just how long it takes to get to CAMC from Beckley. Apparently the magic number for RGH is 58 minutes. That, in our opinion, takes place on a perfect weather day with a relatively unrestricted drive on the Turnpike. How often does that happen?

Besides that, and much more importantly, how is it that we have come to the point that our Health Care Authority is making decisions based on drive time? And that this provision in the suggested standards really only impacts RGH?

On Tuesday we learned that Gov. Manchin is closely reviewing the matter, including the technicalities which seem to single out Beckley.

That’s encouraging because the specifics only need some slight changes to ensure us that a Southern West Virginia facility will get a fair shake on an application come hearing time.

Let RGH, or any other suitors in our region, have the opportunity to apply and be judged based on the premise of access, merit and need — not whether we are 58, 68 or 78 minutes from CAMC.