Why evict patients who need help?
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Chicago Sun-Times
By Mark Brown, Columnist
April 8, 2007
A ragtag procession of patients in wheelchairs made their
way down the long drive leading from Oak Forest Hospital to
the 159th Street entrance on Friday afternoon to hold a rally
protesting their threatened relocation.
Many were paraplegics or quadriplegics. They were bundled in
coats and blankets. Some had to be pushed, while others had
just enough arm strength to manipulate the controls on their
motorized wheelchairs.
Zabrian Goodrich, 35, paralyzed in an auto accident, said he
has been at Oak Forest for two years. Ralph Scroggins, 48, has
been there seven years since suffering a spinal cord injury
that he says resulted from surgery at Stroger Hospital.
Glenn Wise, 46, has been an Oak Forest patient for 18 years,
since he was shot in the head by a Chicago Police officer after
he pulled a stickup with a toy gun.
In all, there are more than 200 affected patients in long-term
care at Oak Forest, most of them too ill or incapacitated to
even make the trip outside the hospital for the protest.
Many see Oak Forest Hospital as home
All of them, though, landed at this county-owned health facility
for more or less the same reason: they have long-term, complicated
medical needs but few if any resources of their own, and somebody
believed this was the best place to take care of them.
Now, however, the county's top health official, Dr. Robert Simon,
has decided it's not cost-effective to provide care for such
patients at Oak Forest and that they'll be just as well off
in nursing homes or other skilled-care facilities.
So hospital officials sent the patients and their family members
and guardians a letter last week warning that they intend to
discontinue all long-term care services and have set a target
date of Sept. 1. The discharge process is scheduled to begin
May 1, the letter warned. At the very least, county officials
say, they intend to trim the number of patients in long-term
care to 70.
That news has been both frightening and confusing to the patients,
many of whom have come to think of Oak Forest as their home.
I confess to being a little confused myself.
The way I see it, either somebody was fooling us all these years
about the need to care for these folks at Oak Forest, or they're
trying to fool us now about how it won't hurt anything to send
them elsewhere.
It's not as if anything has changed other than the people in
charge, those being Simon and the guy who put him in the job,
Cook County Board President Todd Stroger.
Stroger is facing budget problems that weren't of his own making
and is feeling pressure to operate the county health system
more efficiently without raising taxes. I understand that.
But this doesn't have the feel of a decision that was carefully
considered. And more important, I don't see any evidence that
anybody has made a thoughtful analysis of the needs of these
patients, the supply of which, it should be noted, is constantly
replenishing itself.
Dr. Srinivas Jolepalem, an attending physician at Oak Forest,
said patients need the extra medical attention they receive
at the hospital, which would not be available at a regular nursing
home. Many are still trying to learn to walk and talk again.
Jolepalem claims that moving the patients could cause their
conditions to deteriorate -- or even kill them. I don't know
if that's true, but I think Stroger and Simon should have to
publicly explain why it isn't.
The protest was organized by Service Employees International
Union Local 20, which has 600 members working at the hospital,
many of whose jobs are threatened by the cutbacks.
Paying the price
As I shivered in the cold outside the hospital gates with the
patients and the union members, I couldn't help but remember
a similarly frigid spring day just one year ago, when I stood
outside a polling place in Cook County Board President John
Stroger's home ward on primary Election Day.
The polling place was being manned by a pair of Oak Forest workers,
dressed in their purple SEIU windbreakers with matching yellow
sneakers. These "Soldiers for Stroger" were part of
the union's massive effort to turn out the vote for the stroke-stricken
County Board president, motivated by scare tactics alleging
that his opponent Forrest Claypool intended to dismantle the
county health-care system and eliminate their jobs, despite
his pledges to the contrary.
Now it's the patients who are paying the price for their miscalculation.
