The conflict now playing out at Eastern Maine Medical Center is as specific as nighttime staffing levels and as general as the state of the nation’s health care system. EMMC cannot solve all of these problems, but it can and should fix a range of legitimate complaints outlined by physicians in the last week. The medical center’s public board can play a leading role in making sure the physicians’ concerns are addressed and solved.

Doctors don’t complain easily and they don’t organize well, so it is worth noting when a significant group of them present medical concerns to the public. In this case, the concerns are over physician shortages coupled with increased pressure as EMMC expands its role in this half of the state. A shortage of anesthesiologists is perhaps the most pressing problem, but it is not the only one, and all the shortages have been exacerbated by the impression by a number of doctors that EMMC’s administration is either not hearing or not sufficiently responding to the seriousness of the situation.

Hospital administrators may point to pathetically low federal reimbursement rates, a shrinking revenue margin, a nationwide shortage of health care professionals, the aging population requiring more care and a shameful lack of a state plan to address these and numerous other problems. They would be right, and most physicians would readily agree that health care is under pressures absent a generation ago. But that’s not all the doctors are talking about.

EMMC board Chairman John Woodcock will take an important step forward this week in meeting with the hospital’s Medical Staff Executive Committee to hear specific concerns. The shortage of anesthesiologists is expected to grow worse in the coming months. The hospital has offered money to help with recruitment; the number of restrictions on this money, doctors say, means that they do not practically have access to it. Surely, board members could help clarify how money earmarked for recruitment can be used by private practices. Equally important are the issues of patient capacity and the number of patient referrals: Can EMMC provide the wide range of care it says it can provide to the region it serves? The board can’t be expected to fully answer the question of adequate staffing, but it should become more familiar with physicians’ frustration with the hospital’s reach.

It would be a mistake, however, to limit the board’s response strictly to the medical issues recently raised. The fact the physicians believe the best way to make their complaints heard is to make them in public – something they are normally loath to do – should tell board members that other channels for communication are not working, and, from the sound of the complaints, have not been working for some time. Board members should ask doctors whether this is true and, if so, why.

They should also ask about the administration’s immediate response to the concerns raised by physicians. It should not be acceptable to them that this publicly supported institution merely announces, at first, that it won’t comment on issues raised by doctors about the condition of health care as it relates to the hospital. And it should not be acceptable to them that some of their members subsequently belittled both the doctors and their concerns by pointing them toward a “chain of command” that either does not work or, according to doctors, does not truly exist.

EMMC, deservedly, has a large reservoir of goodwill in the community, but it is not infinite and nothing drains it faster than the chronic feuding between it and nearby St. Joseph Hospital. If resources are as scarce as EMMC administrators describe, resolving this long-time turf fight, which has grown considerably worse in the last several years, is imperative for the future of the region’s health care. Board members from both hospitals should be meeting jointly, without their administrators, to reach agreement on ways to cooperate.

No one likes to hear bad news about institutions they cherish or help govern, but the level of concern raised by respected physicians in the community demands that board members take these issues seriously and resolve to act on them. This won’t be a painless procedure and it certainly will involve intense debate as authority is challenged, but it is necessary for the long-term health of EMMC and, therefore, to the community itself.