A hospital is endangered and the silence is deafening

A hospital is endangered and the silence is deafening

Is it that most people simply don’t care that Northside Medical Center may soon fall victim to out-of-town bankers who are busy making calculations that place no value on community equity, or is it that people are in denial? “Oh,” they tell themselves, “those bankers aren’t going to force Northside to close because it just doesn’t make sense.”

Wake up, Youngstown, before it’s too late — if it’s not too late already.

A little over a month ago, we wrote: “Forum Health’s creditors have Northside Medical Center in their cross hairs, and they appear almost eager to pull the trigger. It’s not surprising that New York financiers would be willing to kill a community asset that was 125 years in the making. What’s surprising is that there hasn’t been more support here in the Mahoning Valley for this embattled institution.”

Nothing has happened since to change that assessment, but perhaps the dramatic announcement Thursday by Forum’s former CEO Walter “Buzz” Pishkur that he was resigning from a $9,000-per-week consulting job, will open some eyes. It’s not that Pishkur was turning down what most people would consider a pretty sweet deal — there are a lot of reasons that a man can come to conclude that money isn’t everything — it was what can be implied by his realization that his input on Forum’s recovery plan would be minimal. The clear implication is that the creditors are going to have a hand-picked director at Forum’s helm and the creditors are going to pretty much get what the creditors want.

Joining the process

Mayor Jay Williams recently took an encouraging step: he authorized the law department to seek recognition as an interested party in the bankruptcy and will attempt to argue for the city’s interests before the court. Obviously hundreds of workers at Northside, their families and the dozens of communities in which they live have an enormous stake in the continued operation of the facility. The city of Youngstown also has a stake, not least of all because those workers pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in municipal income taxes.

But the community at large has a stake because Northside Medical Center did not happen by accident. It was part of an evolutionary process that began 125 years ago and went through permutations of the Youngstown Hospital Association, Western Reserve Care System and, most recently, Forum Health. Across five generations, thousands of people contributed to the growth of a single city hospital into a health care system that operates multiple facilities, employing thousands and treating tens of thousands in Mahoning and Trumbull counties. Their contributions ranged from a few dollars for a bulb on the annual Christmas tree on the North Side campus to millions of dollars from some of the most prominent families in the Valley.

A community effort

Those contributions, as well as millions of hours of sweat equity by faithful volunteers, make Forum, including Northside Medical Center, a creation of the community that deserves better than it is likely to get from bankers and a bankruptcy judge unless the community and all of its representatives become more proactive.

Pishkur maintained that he had a plan that would have made Forum’s three primary facilities, Northside, Trumbull Memorial and Hillside hospitals self-sustaining within three years. That timeline wasn’t good enough for the creditors, who also criticized Pishkur for an absence of experience in the health care industry. But Pishkur had a strong background in the water business — which is a lot more complicated to run than turning on the tap — and we’ll never know how his ability to run one business may have equipped him to run another. We do know that he did better for Aqua Ohio than a succession of professional administrators and consultants who were paid million over the years did for Forum Health.

It is not enough for Mayor Williams to have his law department try to inject itself into the bankruptcy process. It is not enough for workers at Northside to express their concerns over job losses. It is time for every elected official in this area, local, state and congressional to ask themselves this simple question: “If Northside is closed, will I be able to say I did my best to save it?”

A follow-up question: “If I didn’t, why should anyone vote to re-elect me?”