ROCKINGHAM-Do the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital nurses understand the implications of walking off the job now?
Their employer is on the skids with a $14.5 million deficit. A strike would further damage the hospital’s already- sagging reputation, driving more patients to Cheshire Medical Center in Keene, Grace Cottage in Townsend, or Dartmouth Hitchcock in Lebanon, depriving the struggling hospital of desperately needed revenue.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy wouldn’t be pretty. When a hospital files, it typically enters a court-supervised process intended to restructure its debt rather than shut down immediately. This allows the facility to continue providing medical services while working on a financial recovery plan or searching for a buyer.
Given horror stories of corporate hospital ownership in Massachusetts and elsewhere, our community probably wouldn’t want a private owner even if one were to show interest.
Financial strain may lead to reduced staff, longer wait times in emergency rooms, or the cancellation of non-essential procedures. While many hospitals try to avoid layoffs, staff may face pay cuts, reduced hours, or increased workloads due to budget constraints.
The nurses’ anger regarding mismanagement is understandable. They are justifiably incensed at a board that paid over $400,000 in salary and benefits per year to a CEO who stopped coming to work when the going got rough. And they rightly criticize management that waited for years before thinning the ranks of expensive middle managers.
Co-CEOs Drs. Elizabeth McLarney and Tony Blofson are doing a great job of managing a hospital in survival mode. They’re making every effort to provide excellent patient care, fair wages, and job security while skirting bankruptcy.
Delayed gratification would be the nurses union’s wisest move. Postponing wage and benefit demands until the hospital is in better shape would be temporarily painful, but doing so pales in comparison to what bankruptcy would mean for them and their community.
Rick Cowan
Rockingham
This letter to the editor was submitted to The Commons.
This piece, published in print in the Voices section or as a column in the news sections, represents the opinion of the writer. In the newspaper and on this website, we strive to ensure that opinions are based on fair expression of established fact. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, The Commons is reviewing and developing more precise policies about editing of opinions and our role and our responsibility and standards in fact-checking our own work and the contributions to the newspaper. In the meantime, we heartily encourage civil and productive responses at voices@commonsnews.org.