The facility opened before it should have, before it had office furniture or medical equipment, before it had a budget to operate and, based on reports, before it even had its water issues squared away.
Maybe the contractor is partially or even completely at fault regarding the construction defects. What is abundantly clear, however, is that while the hunt begins for the guilty, one cannot overlook the politicians who pushed to finance such an undertaking when no one in the medical field supported it, and government officials who supported it without regard for how much it would cost to operate and maintain a huge facility.
The list should also include department heads, including the secretaries of Public Health and Public Works, neither of whom is qualified to direct a project of this complexity. End result: a giant building that doesn’t work the way it was intended and isn’t adequately funded. Here is a building dedicated to dialysis without a renal specialist, that has dialysis equipment but not enough supplies.
Federal officials argued against the expenditure of funds for a building dedicated to the tertiary treatment of diabetes, and recommended that funds should go to prevention. But capital improvement projects are the most visible signs of progress so no one argues against new construction. The experts, however, are not left to their own in designing these projects thus ensuring that many problems will emerge.
On Tuesday morning, the House of Representatives held a public hearing to examine CHC’s problems; no one came. Apparently, there is no expectation that these legislators will do anything to effect change at the hospital. It seems that no one believes that the committee is prepared to conduct serious hearings. It has no documents from the hospital, and all the committee can say is that the results of its survey were bad.
There are, to be sure, good arguments to be made in favor of conducting public hearings, but there must be positive results. Otherwise, public expectations will sink farther, and more harm is likely to be visited upon patients going to the hospital.
The SAT-10 results
THEY were abysmal yet they were reported by the Public School System as if they weren’t. Alarms should be ringing in every quarter of this community. In most public schools, in most grades, the commonwealth’s kids are performing below 45 percent and as low as 38 percent. This has been the trend for close to 20 years.
These children are not being given the tools necessary to do well in any community. They are graduating without the competence to read or do basic math and this will hurt their ability to find and keep good paying jobs. Indeed, the labor issue is tied to education in a few critical ways that have not been examined very closely. It is past time to do so.
