An unconfirmed report making the Twitter rounds in Asheville has Mission Hospitals closing the St. Joseph’s emergency room in October. Can someone confirm?
It would make sense. It’s got to be extraordinarily expensive for Mission to operate both. With the health care debate continuing at the White House level, this would be a big move on the local level to be scrutinized. Look for this story to be pursued hard Monday.
This video gives you a basic history of Mission and St. Joseph’s. It’s narrated by former Asheville Citizen-Times reporter and columnist Nancy Marlowe.
4 Comments
That would SERIOUSLY suck. In December I had a fall and broke two ribs. I went to a Sisters of Mercy Urgent Care Center first because I had heard of the nightmare waits at Mission/S. Joseph’s. I got X-Rayed, diagnosed with two broken ribs, given a CD-ROM with my X-Rays and sent to Mission ER. After 3.5 painful hours of waiting and thinking about my options, I just gave up and went home. I’d come to the assumption that there wasn’t much they could do, it would take FOREVER and cost me more than my meager income could possibly cover.
In the interest of public health and safety please let this not be true. The waits are already notorious and painful for the patient. Mission, have some sympathy and do your job.
By the way the big fat bitch at the Mission ER check in was cruel and actually laughed at my agony. She should have chosen prison guard as her profession. Shouldn’t heath officials represent some kind of passion for the patient and have some self respect by not treating their bodies to 275 pounds of fat?
Thanks for these clarifications, folks. wvler, I’ll check the archives. thanks for that. and KXR, thank you for your info.
sounds like it is common knowledge on the Mission campus, but not really known to the public.
They are "consolidating," not "closing," per say. The staff that currently work in the St. Joe’s ED will go to the Mission campus. They’re doing a lot of remodeling at the Mission ED to expand a little and get ready for this. Originally, the merge was supposed to occur in June/July, but I also have heard the date is now the first of October.
This has been known for a while. Dr Sig, the in house "ask the expert" column in the staff paper has talked about it. There has been e-mails about it between the staff affected. The ER at Mission is expanding and they will close the St Joe’s ER once this happens. From what some have heard, the ER admit unit will take over the rooms that the Neuro-trauma ICU was using since that Dept has moved over into the new Dogwood building that opened recently. This will give more rooms to the main ER and the staff from both sides of the road will be combined at Mission to hopefully allow it to run smoother and faster. You can probably go back and look through the old "Scope" newsletters to find letters about the moves. The scope archives are under the staff log-in link on the Mission Hospital web site. You don’t have to be staff or have a log-in to get these. The only thing is you can’t search them. This all has been in the works since before the econ tanked, so that really doesn’t play much into this.