Letters to the Editor 11/21/24

On Northwell’s commitments to Sharon Hospital

Thank you for last week’s front-page article reporting on the public hearing held by state regulators considering the proposed affiliation between Nuvance Health and Northwell Health. If approved, the affiliation would put Sharon Hospital under Northwell’s umbrella.

A few weeks before the hearing, Northwell executives travelled to Sharon to meet in person with Save Sharon Hospital members to discuss the future of Sharon Hospital. After those discussions, Mark Solazzo, Northwell’s Chief Operating Officer, signed a letter committing to several of our requests.

I would like to highlight some of these promises:

1) Maintain Sharon Hospital as a full-service community hospital, including 24/7 surgical capability and a full-service emergency department.

2) Sustain Labor and Delivery services at Sharon Hospital, with a dedicated effort to grow volume by attracting new patients within the existing service area and expanding the communities currently served by the hospital. To fulfill this commitment, Northwell will recruit and otherwise engage staff and physicians, provide competitive, market-appropriate compensation to staff, and offer competitive and attractive engagement vehicles to community physicians, including payment at competitive rates for the provision of on-call coverage services.

3) Implement a public relations and marketing campaign intended to affirm the status of Sharon Hospital and its Labor and Delivery services to the wider service area.

4) Coordinate with the local medical community to introduce a new provider workforce in support of practice expansion and ongoing succession planning, including in the areas of obstetrics, pediatrics, primary care, family medicine, and general surgery. Northwell Health also will recruit for other medical subspecialities such as urology, neurology, and pulmonology.

5) Establish ongoing community relationships to bridge and bring together various local constituents, with regular town hall or community meetings open to the public.

6) Promote broad representation of various constituencies on the local community hospital advisory board, which would include a representative from SSH and enable the goal of establishing a diversity of voices and community member participation.

Because Northwell was willing to put these commitments in writing, Save Sharon Hospital used our status as an intervenor in the CT Office of Health Strategy (OHS) hearing to support the affiliation between Northwell and Nuvance, requesting that OHS include Mr. Solazzo’s commitments to our community in any resulting settlement between the hospital organizations and the State of Connecticut.

Lydia Moore

Save Sharon Hospital

Sharon

Treating others with respect, especially now

This retired family physician had an interesting experience today. While running a variety of errands, I spontaneously stopped at a Northwest Corner grocery store to run in and get a few items missing from my pantry. I was wearing the work-clothes I had had on while doing yard-work just before leaving. Dirt-streaked blue-jeans, a black turtleneck and a gray zip-up sweatshirt. My hair was in a ratty ponytail. When I got to the checkout, I put my card through the slide bar at the left of the machine twice and got a card rejected note each time. The cashier looked at me with deep suspicion. This made me nervous, so when I finally used the chip-reader slide-in at the bottom, I accidentally hit cancel after putting in my PIN. This made the cashier even more upset, and possibly confused about what to do. Suddenly an older worker raced toward me, grabbed the card, and tapped it against the screen. Bingo! The payment went through. She more or less stormed back to what she had been doing. I wonder if this would have happened if I had looked more like a doctor. Every stranger on the planet deserves to be treated with respect when they are first encountered, whether or not the person meeting them has had a lot of encounters with unpleasant people that day. This is especially true at this time, when division and suspicion seem to have trumped our normal American goodwill.

Anna Timell, MD

Cornwall

Thanks to community for coat drive support

If it wasn’t for the Northwest Corner’s overwhelming and gracious support, Salisbury Central School would not be able to say “Our community has collected 414 coats etc. to benefit FISH of Torrington!” FISH (Friends In Service to Humanity) provides food, shelter and clothing to people in need.

I had the good fortune of meeting Deirdre Houlihan DiCara, the Executive Director of FISH, and she inspired me to get my school enthusiastically involved. Thanks to Jennifer Moros, my choral director and music teacher at SCS, this was possible.

But this was mostly possible because of everyone who took the time and energy looking through their closets or putting flyers up in local businesses. We most certainly wouldn’t be here without your support. Thank you.

Special thanks to Chris and Jon Ryan of Ryan Funeral Home in Lakeville for transporting items to FISH, Mike Flint of WHDD for having me on Robin Hood Radio, Roxanne Lee of Lakeville Journal for putting my PSA in the Journal multiple times and Ruth Epstein of the Republican American for mentioning us in the paper. And we can’t forget our first contributor, Judy Gafney of Lakeville.

Until next year!

Jackson V. Magyar

Lakeville