Jennifer Bacani McKenney: Hospital closure is having a ripple effect

More than a month after the closing of Mercy Hospital in Independence, the effects are being felt beyond the health care of a single town. Like a stone thrown into a pond creates ever-widening ripples, the results of this closure are moving through the area and widening.

The loss of Mercy Hospital is a devastating blow to the nearly 10,000 people of Independence, local businesses and surrounding small hospitals, such as my own. I am a family physician in Fredonia – a town of 2,500 people, 30 miles from Independence, with a 25-bed critical access hospital. We have five primary care physicians and have been taking patients from Independence in our already full clinics.

Not only has Independence lost an entire hospital, but it has lost family physicians, pediatricians, obstetricians and surgeons, as well as their nursing teams. Urgent care facilities that have been set up in Independence will attempt to fill this void but will not replace the primary care services the community once had.

Patients who can afford to drive to surrounding cities to see a physician have done so; many even drive to Bartlesville, Okla., taking their medical care out of state.

Those without health insurance or a means to travel to other cities rely on the emergency rooms in neighboring cities for their primary source of health care, which is a very inefficient and expensive way to access health care. Small, rural hospitals such as ours in Fredonia are absorbing the costs of ambulance rides and emergency room visits of people without health care coverage.

Additionally, businesses in Independence have felt this ripple effect and will likely suffer from the closure of the local hospital. Businesses may have to consider relocating because they won’t have the necessary health care for their employees in Independence.

The loss of Mercy Hospital has and will continue to have far-reaching effects. Unlike the name of their community – Independence – local citizens are now largely dependent on health care systems outside their community.

Expansion of our KanCare system is one way the hospital’s closure might have been avoided. Let’s not wait for more hospitals to close. Let’s urge legislators to recognize that future hospital closures might be avoided by expansion of KanCare to extend coverage and ensure local health care, providing more independence for all.

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 6:01 PM with the headline "Jennifer Bacani McKenney: Hospital closure is having a ripple effect."