CLEARFIELD – A committee of citizens continues their fight to keep their community hospital open.
At Thursday’s meeting, resident John Sughrue spoke to the Clearfield Borough Council about concerns residents had regarding recent changes to Penn Highlands Clearfield, formerly known as the Clearfield Hospital.
Sughrue presented the council with a petition containing nearly 1,200 signatures of people wishing to speak out against what has been happening at the hospital, along with a six-page letter, outlining the specific concerns the residents had.
Sughrue said he will be visiting all the elected officials in the area, and that he has already spoken to the state senators and representatives. Sughrue said there were “serious problems” with the way Penn Highlands has been handling the operations of the hospital, which could be the life or death of the community.
Sughrue said the local hospital board has no power and that the decisions regarding the Clearfield branch of Penn Highlands is made by the corporate board.
He said with the Intensive Care Unit closed, the hospital can no longer admit seriously sick patients. He said Penn Highlands has submitted applications on two, separate occasions to have all surgical procedures shut down by 3:30 p.m. Sughrue said this means that if someone has surgery earlier in the day and complications arise, surgeons would not be able to address the problem after 3:30 p.m.
“When they announced Penn Highlands was taking over the hospitals, they told us that they’d keep the local boards, but Penn Highlands is a corporation and they have all the power. If the Clearfield hospital board wants to do something, they have to go to Penn Highlands for permission.
“If Penn Highlands decides they don’t like someone serving on the board, they can remove them for no reason. We’re hoping to bring together all the local government agencies, the county and State Reps. (Tommy) Sankey and (Matt) Gabler to see what we can do about the hospital.”
Sughrue said that Penn Highlands has been conclusively dismantling the hospital in Clearfield with little or no input or communication from or with the community.
“We want the board to come forward and tell us why they’re doing this,” Sughrue said.
Also speaking at the meeting was resident and former councilmember Jim Leitzinger.
“They don’t give a diddly-squat about this community or this hospital,” Leitzinger said. “They took the radiation department out of the Yingling Cancer. I remember when that cancer center was opened and how proud the people were because they didn’t have to travel to Altoona or State College for their cancer treatments.
“There are a lot of elderly citizens who are going through radiation and now have to travel the whole way to DuBois. They closed the Armstrong Birthing Center, they closed the ICU. This is our hospital, built by our parents. It doesn’t just cover Clearfield. It covers Curwensville, Grampian, Karthaus, Woodland and all the other areas.”
Councilman Jim Kling urged all members of council to read Sughrue’s letter.
“I know from the meetings that I’ve attended that this is putting a lot of stress on our EMS service,” Kling said. “They run four units, three on the street and one in reserve. When they have to transport someone to DuBois, it’s not just a 20-minute trip over the mountain, they can be sitting there for several hours and that’s one less ambulance for our area.
“We built that EMS service for our community. I don’t see a whole lot of people wanting to volunteer to get out of bed in the middle of the night and drive a patient over the ice-covered mountain. We are losing what we worked so hard to build.”
Kling said the changes have been putting a strain not only on the EMS, but also on all emergency service, including the police department.