Keep the momentum going for a public hospital district in Kitsap
As Dr. Al-Agba points out in her excellent recent column, “Struggles at St. Michael beyond the ER and how a public hospital district could help”, Kitsap County is extremely underserved with inadequate acute care hospital beds available for county residents.
The archaic system of allocating these beds in Washington, the Certificate of Need (CON) Program run by the Department of Health (DOH), has determined that our needs are met and no more hospital beds will be allowed. To make matters worse, not all of the beds allocated to VMFH (St. Michaels) via the CON process are in use. Until the second tower is built at the VMFH Silverdale Campus, currently scheduled to be completed in 2025, there are 73 allocated beds that are not in use after the Bremerton campus was closed. In effect, VMFH is hoarding those beds as placeholders for when the second tower is opened on the Silverdale campus.
The only way around this is a hospital district, which is not required to ask the DOH for permission via the CON process. Forming a hospital district is a citizen initiative and some of your elected mayors, city councilmembers and community leaders are already discussing this. They just need a little push from us, the people who vote to keep them in office.
Carollynn Zimmers, Poulsbo
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Keep the momentum going for a public hospital district in Kitsap
