Coastal voices: Hospital-hired docs no panacea

Over the past several years, our community has been working diligently to understand what we need to do to ensure timely access to health-care services.

Physicians, community and hospital leaders have organized the Physician Retention and Recruitment Committee to specifically address these issues at the local level and the recent selection of Del Norte County and Adjacent Tribal Lands as a California Endowment Building Healthy Communities Project site has the potential to bring us additional resources and hope for improving the health status of our communities’ residents.

As we move forward, we need to be able to examine and explore various options for bringing additional providers to our area while still respecting and nurturing the contributions that have already been made.

The slant of Tuesday’s Triplicate article, “Hospital hopes bill will allow doc hires,” deeply concerns me. This is a very complex and sensitive topic and I feel that my words were twisted in a manner unfair to both me and the excellent physicians in our community.  My conversation with the reporter was taken out of context and inserted between quotes from one state representative’s media relations officer about another legislator’s position.

While I am sure it was unintentional, this misrepresentation has proved to be inflammatory and insulting to our physicians and embarrassing to me. 

When asked to discuss Assembly Bill 648, I responded that there are three similar bills in the Legislature and that I was not entirely familiar with the nuances of the various bills. I also stated that I was not in a position to discuss them.  

I was asked why a physician may want to be employed, and explained that many of the physicians I have tried to recruit are looking for an employment situation, and gave some of their reasons. We also discussed some of the challenges facing doctors, including increasing regulatory pressures and the low reimbursement rates from Medi-Cal.

As it appeared in The Triplicate, it sounds like I said all doctors want to be employed, and that private practice physicians cannot compete with employed doctors. This is absolutely not the case. A thriving environment for providers would include multiple practice options, including the ability to choose either self-employed private practice or clinic-based employment depending upon individual preferences.

Health care is a perplexing issue at the community, state, and federal levels.  There are no simple solutions.  We are examining many different options to accommodate the health-care needs of our community. The supply of local physicians is studied in depth and reviewed by independent agencies to ensure that we are recruiting the number and types of doctors that will be complementary to our existing medical staff.

The article failed to include my comments that the ability of the hospital to hire physicians is not a panacea.  I specifically stated that it is not the “silver bullet” for solving the physician shortage in our community.  While it would be nice to find a way to accommodate physicians that would prefer to be employed, it is not our goal to replace private practice.  All of the physicians on staff at Sutter Coast make significant contributions to our community and hospital.

We need to remember and respect those physicians based in private practice settings who have invested their own resources into making excellent healthcare available locally.

Grant Scholes is director of public relations and physician recruiting at Sutter Coast Hospital.