Hospital consolidation plan opposed

WATERVILLE – A former trustee of Thayer Hospital in Waterville is opposed to plans to move or consolidate MaineGeneral Medical Center, saying working with current facilities is best.

David Brown says instead of closing the hospital’s Waterville units to build a new facility in Sidney, hospital officials should stick with their current buildings.

“Why not reconfigure what we have right now, both in Waterville and Augusta, instead of going down the path of discarding what we have for one super facility?” he said.

Waterville surgeon Sheridan Oldham, who spearheaded the Save Our Hospitals protest, also favors restructuring.

“When you get into specialties, that’s when you need to think consolidation and putting a particular specialty in one location,” she said.

Oldham said MaineGeneral’s hospitals have gotten more than $20 million in renovations in recent years. She said consolidation can help control capital costs.

For example, MaineGeneral added a cardiac catheterization laboratory to its Augusta campus in 2002. Cardiologists in Waterville drive there to use the lab. Oldham argues the same approach could work for MaineGeneral’s cancer treatment department.

Rather than continue to offer such a service at both campuses, Oldham said, treatment should take place at one location.

But Lisa Marrache, a Waterville physician who also represents the city in the Legislature, does not see a consolidated facility as the answer to a downward trend in moneymaking hip and knee replacements.

Rather than focus on new buildings, Marrache said, hospital officials should focus on better marketing the quality of service available at MaineGeneral.

“People feel they are cheating themselves out of the best care if they stay locally,” she said. “I hear that a lot when I have people who need to get elective surgery.”

This perception, she says, is the fundamental problem facing MaineGeneral, not old buildings and duplicated services.

Steven Michaud, president of the Augusta-based Maine Hospital Association, does not take a side in the controversy but offers an opinion about the state’s current 38-hospital configuration.

“I think it’s fair to say you wouldn’t do it the way we are configured now,” he said, “but all of this has evolved because communities started a hospital because they saw a need.”