- Martin General Hospital in Williamston, North Carolina, is one of more than 100 rural hospitals to downsize or close over the past decade.
- A lack of available health care could pose a challenge to President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, as he and former President Donald Trump battle for votes in the state. It’s highlighted.
- County and state officials said they are working to reopen Martin General Hospital as a freestanding emergency room.
Weeds have invaded the empty parking lot of Martin General Hospital’s emergency room. The makeshift blue tarpaulin covering the hospital signboard is flapping in the wind and falling apart. Hospital doors are locked, leaving many in this county of 22,000 in permanent fear.
Some residents fear lives could be lost following the hospital’s sudden closure last August.
“I know we all have to die, but the hospital is… “It seems like more people are dying since the shutdown.” A nearby elementary school’s kitchen.
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In rural areas like Williamston, more than 100 hospitals have reduced services or closed completely over the past decade, meaning that if people are in a serious car accident, they have to take a 25-minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital. He openly doubts whether he will be saved.
When Quorum Health closed its 43-bed hospital in Martin County, citing “financial issues related to population decline and utilization trends,” residents here didn’t just lose their sense of security. They also lost faith in the leaders they elected to make their cities better places to live.
People like Bobby Woolard, 73, believe they can’t trust anyone in politics, from their local county commissioners to the presidential candidates who will move through this battleground state with big campaign promises in the coming months. To tell. problem.
The vacant storefront Martin County General Hospital in Williamston, North Carolina, has been sitting behind a chain since it closed in August 2023, leaving it abandoned until April 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Carl B. DeBraker)
“If you get seriously ill, there’s no help here,” Woolard said on a sunny April afternoon as he trimmed his neighbor’s hedges. “No one seems to care. There are empty buildings and no one seems to care.”
Is there a problem with Biden’s health care campaign?
Sentiment in this sharply polarized and isolated eastern North Carolina county could spell trouble for President Joe Biden, who has made health care a key part of his re-election campaign against Republican rival Donald Trump. There is a possibility that
His television campaign ads focus on President Trump’s promise to roll back the Affordable Care Act. Biden regularly reminds his followers on social media about the law he signed that caps the cost of insulin. And in North Carolina, the campaign is mostly focused on promoting Democrats’ successful effort to expand Medicaid, which would extend nearly free government health insurance to thousands of people and reduce hospital poverty.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are engaged in a fierce battle over the state, which will also host the year’s most closely watched gubernatorial election. Martin County, where Williamston is located, voted for Trump in 2020.
“Health care is on the ballot this year, and voters will remember that when they reject Donald Trump in November,” said Dolly McMillan, North Carolina communications director for the Biden campaign. Told.
But Mr. Biden’s success may not be enough for key voters in North Carolina towns like this one. There, people have difficulty accessing emergency medical care when they need it.
Nationwide, emergency room wait times have skyrocketed, with the average emergency room visit last year taking nearly three hours, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Health systems are also grappling with a shortage of health care workers, exacerbated by the emergence of a burnt-out workforce during the pandemic.
These problems are particularly acute in rural areas, where more than 68 hospitals have closed in the past decade. Closures have slowed as the federal government has provided billions of dollars in additional funding to hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. But once that money is spent, hospital closures could accelerate again, said George Pink, associate director of the Rural Health Research Program at the University of North Carolina’s Shepps Center.
Pink said what residents will miss most is emergency room care.
“Life events such as heart attacks, strokes and childbirth require prompt and appropriate emergency medical care,” Pink said. “The areas that lost their rural hospitals don’t have one.”
The system is “at risk”
Months before Williamston’s hospital closed, an outside consultant issued a stark warning about emergency care in the county.
The county’s volunteer first response system is ineffective, with long response times exceeding 15 minutes in some areas “putting lives at risk,” a consultant told county commissioners last April.
A consultant advised the county that the system is “in dire need of vision, direction, guidance, command and control, and additional financial support,” according to meeting minutes.
Things have only gotten worse since Martin General Hospital closed.
Lengthy drives to out-of-county hospitals mean ambulances and their crews are tied up and on the run, sometimes for hours, said Williamston Fire Rescue Capt. Kenny Warren.
“Calls that used to take 20 to 30 minutes now take an hour to two hours, depending on where you’re traveling,” Warren said. He added that the agency is staffed with emergency medical technicians, but not paramedics trained to provide a higher level of care to patients in emergencies.
But Warren said he doesn’t believe anyone died as a result.
“Most of the results would probably have been the same anyway,” he said.
In December, first responders arrived on a Williamston street within three minutes of receiving a 911 call that several shots had been fired and a young man may have been killed.
They tried unsuccessfully to arrange for a medical helicopter to transport the 21-year-old shooting victim. The closest option was to take him by ambulance to a six-bed hospital, which is 21 minutes away. All told, it took 34 minutes from the time of the 911 call until he arrived at the scene, according to police dispatch records. He was transferred from that hospital to a high-level trauma center, where he died several days later.
The scene of the shooting was just four minutes from the grounds of Martin General Hospital.
‘Do you really care? ‘
More than a dozen Williamston residents interviewed for this article accused the Martin County Commission of failing to prevent the troubled hospital from closing.
Last month, Williamston resident Verna Perry told commissioners that her sister drove 25 minutes to the nearest hospital, only to find that she couldn’t get the treatment she needed.
“Committee members, do you really care?” Perry asked. “If you’re concerned, you can take us here to the hospital.”
Caitlin Paxton was seeking treatment for asthma at Martin General Hospital’s emergency room on the day it closed. She watched as staff carried patients out on stretchers and transferred them to other hospitals.
Since then, she has struggled to find family doctors and specialists to replace the doctors who retired after the hospital closed.
“When it comes to daily doctor visits and consultations, my personal experience is that finding someone has been a nightmare,” she said.
She has been using a federally qualified health center called Agape Health, one of the few facilities in the county still providing primary care. These medical centers, which she operates at more than 1,000 locations across the United States, receive federal funding and accept patients on a sliding scale pay scale, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay.
Agape Health added Saturday hours due to an influx of new patients after Martin General closed, said Dr. Michael McDuffie, the clinic’s CEO. Last month, Agape reopened one of its orthopedic clinics that had closed along with the hospital.
McDuffie hopes to reopen Martin General next, even if only as a standalone emergency room.
“It could mean life or death,” McDuffie said. “We need an emergency department here to at least stabilize their lives.”
Interim County Manager Ben Eisner said the county still owns the hospital and the land and is working with state officials and representatives from the federal Department of Health and Human Services to determine whether the facility can be reopened as a regional acute care hospital. He said he is in discussions with Gov. Roy Cooper helped enact a new state law allowing North Carolina’s rural hospitals to transition.
The Rural Acute Hospital Program was developed by Congress, signed into law by President Trump, and tweaked by the Biden administration. This designation frees up millions of federal dollars and enhances Medicare payments for rural hospitals if they remain open to provide emergency care 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
“The simple question we are trying to answer is how do we move from being closed to being open in a way that makes sense for the residents of Martin County,” Eisner said.
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If successful, Martin County will become the first hospital in the country to reopen after being closed under the new federal designation.
“It’s a top priority for us. We live it every day as a community,” Paxton said of reopening the hospital. That will be her top concern as she votes in this fall’s presidential election.
Still, she said, “I just don’t think that’s a top priority for the president or the senators.”
