HoodaThunk?

Great town hall sign

Simple, succinct, and completely accurate. Add in the fact that it’s a home-made town hall sign – unlike OFA’s and SEIU’s mass-produced Obama campaign signage – and you’ve got beauty in civic activism. Good job, sir!

August 19th, 2009 Posted by ricjames | Medicine, Politics | 2 comments

HCA will try it again – plans are announced to build a hospital on Route 50

HCA announces plans to build the StoneSpring Medical Center (SMC) off Route 50:

HCA Virginia today announced it will seek state and county approvals to move its proposed hospital in Loudoun County, Virginia, from Broadlands to Route 50. The new hospital project – StoneSpring Medical Center (SMC) – replaces Broadlands Regional Medical Center (BRMC).

“Our decision to target a new site in Loudoun serves the best interests of all who live and work there,” said Margaret Lewis, President of HCA’s Capital Division and Senior Executive of HCA Virginia. “While Route 50 wasn’t our first choice for a location, we have modified our plans in response to county residents who need not only hospital beds and services, but also hospital choice and competition.”

The location proposed is a 50-acre plot at the intersection of Route 50 and Gum Spring Road. The facility is to be a 4-story, 337K-square foot building with 164 beds (40 child and the rest adult), 7 operating rooms and a cardiac catheterization lab. Having just been a patient in one of those this year, I can tell you from 1st-person experience that while Inova Loudoun has such a lab, it’s not equipped to actually perform stent insertions. That’s why they sent me over to Fair Oaks in Reston via an ambulance when I had to have mine done. It would be nice for Loudouners to have access to one.

Of course, having it over there on Route 50 means it’s 18 miles from my neighborhood and about 14 from Sterling. Reston Hospital is less than half of that. Considering that the population density in Loudoun has the vast majority of Loudoun’s residents over here in the Sterling/Cascades/Countryside area, that location isn’t going to be of much help to most of Loudoun’s residents. Well, we had the chance to fix that and it was… well, it wasn’t.

When the BMRC was being debated the song and dance offered up by those people who were adamantly opposed to allowing a 2nd hospital to be built was that everything would be just fine and they’d approve if only it was being built down on Route 50. Well, it’s put up or shut up time, folks. And yes, Supervisors Waters, Delgaudio, Burk, Buckly, and Kurtz, I’m talking to you. You have the chance to push your precious pin into the map so it looks all nice and balanced, now, regardless of whether it’s in the position to help the majority of Loudoun’s citizens which is what you said you wanted all along. So let’s see the support and let’s see it before you have to consider running for re-election as an excuse to hold off.

I have a similar thought in mind for those of my fellow Loudouners who were right there alongside of these 5 Supervisors. If you weren’t lying through your teeth when you said you’d support the application if only it were on Route 50 and not up in Broadlands then let’s hear it – tell us you’re going to support it this time and bring Loudoun’s medical capabilities up to the halfway mark of where it should be, as it should have been 5 years ago.

More to come as this story progresses.

August 19th, 2009 Posted by ricjames | Politics, Virginia Politics | 4 comments