Letters to the Editor: Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024

Amenia fire thank-you

On Sunday, Nov. 17, the Amenia Fire Company sponsored our monthly Pancake Breakfast. We were pleased to have a crowd of 163 people in attendance for our monthly meal. We rely on the breakfasts to raise needed money for general operations and we always appreciate the support of the community. We thank everyone who attends our events and we will return again on December 15.
Andy Murphy,
on behalf of the
Breakfast Committee
Amenia Fire Co. and Auxiliary
Amenia

Northwell’s Sharon Hospital pledge

Thank you for last week’s front-page article reporting on the public hearing held by state regulators considering the proposed affiliation between Nuvance Health and Northwell Health. If approved, the affiliation would put Sharon Hospital under Northwell’s umbrella. A few weeks before the hearing, Northwell executives travelled to Sharon to meet in person with Save Sharon Hospital members to discuss the future of Sharon Hospital. After those discussions, Mark Solazzo, Northwell’s Chief Operating Officer, signed a letter committing to several of our requests. I would like to highlight some of these promises:
1) Maintain Sharon Hospital as a full-service community hospital, including 24/7 surgical capability and a full-service emergency department.
2) Sustain Labor and Delivery services at Sharon Hospital, with a dedicated effort to grow volume by attracting new patients within the existing service area and expanding the communities currently served by the hospital. To fulfill this commitment, Northwell will recruit and otherwise engage staff and physicians, provide competitive, market-appropriate compensation to staff, and offer competitive and attractive engagement vehicles to community physicians, including payment at competitive rates for the provision of on-call coverage services.
3) Implement a public relations and marketing campaign intended to affirm the status of Sharon Hospital and its Labor and Delivery services to the wider service area.
4) Coordinate with the local medical community to introduce a new provider workforce in support of practice expansion and ongoing succession planning, including in the areas of obstetrics, pediatrics, primary care, family medicine, and general surgery. Northwell Health also will recruit for other medical subspecialities such as urology, neurology, and pulmonology.
5) Establish ongoing community relationships to bridge and bring together various local constituents, with regular town hall or community meetings open to the public.
6) Promote broad representation of various constituencies on the local community hospital advisory board, which would include a representative from SSH and enable the goal of establishing a diversity of voices and community member participation.
Because Northwell was willing to put these commitments in writing, Save Sharon Hospital used our status as an intervenor in the CT Office of Health Strategy (OHS) hearing to support the affiliation between Northwell and Nuvance, requesting that OHS include Mr. Solazzo’s commitments to our community in any resulting settlement between the hospital organizations and the State of Connecticut.
Lydia Moore
Save Sharon Hospital
Sharon