Weeds have punctured through the vacant parking lot of Martin General Hospital’s emergency room. A makeshift blue tarp covering the hospital’s sign is worn down from flapping in the wind. The hospital doors are locked, many in this county of 22,000 fear permanently.
Some residents worry the hospital’s sudden closure last August could cost them their life.
“I know we all have to die, but it seems like since the hospital closed, there’s a lot more people dying,” Linda Gibson, a lifelong resident of Williamston, North Carolina, said on a recent afternoon while preparing snacks for children in a nearby elementary school kitchen.
More than 100 hospitals have downsized services or closed altogether over the past decade in rural communities like Williamston, where people openly wonder if they’d survive the 25-minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital if they were in a serious car crash.
It’s not just the financial part. There’s still a huge shortage of qualified doctors. Even if you had infinite money to keep rural hospitals open, they couldn’t all be staffed with enough doctors.
There’s also a management issue. Most doctors are terrible at management, but it’s common for doctors to make the bulk of hospital management. Professional managers have the opposite problem as they don’t really understand patient care.
This leads to all sorts of odd problems, a notable one is the 12+ hour shift in most hospitals. This was done in part to reduce patient death, because transfer of care is the cause of most errors.