Opportunity for a Second Site.

A large parcel of land at the nexus of Bellevue and Redmond just went on sale. Consider:

• Overlake: 28 acres, 78$ million, zoned for up to 125 foot buildings and currently contains a former Group Health hospital (Seattle Times).
  
• 136 Laurelon Condos: 6 acres, 93$ million, zoned residential (Seattle Times).

Yet CHRMC has told neighbors that the Overlake site is "too small."

The Hospital needs to consider a second in-patient site as part of its EIS. The impacts of a massive expansion at the Hospital's current site may very well be unmitigatable. This makes it ever-more essential for the Hospital to explicitly, publicly justify the trade-offs of accumulating 600 beds in NE Seattle vs. establishing a second site for in-patient care.

We ask: Why not put the beds where the kids are?

Consider where the kids are.

• Seattle? Only 17% of the Hospital's patients came from Seattle in 2006, according to the Hospital’s own report. Furthermore, “Seattle [is] second only to San Francisco as the big city with the lowest percentage of households with children — only 20 percent have children under 18” (Seattle Times).
• The Eastside (for example). Issaquah's population (for example) just grew 26% in one year alone (Seattle Times). Yet remember, Children’s has filed suit to halt Swedish’s construction of 175 new beds (including pediatric beds) in Issaquah (Seattle Times).

Consider real transportation hurdles for patients and families. If you are an Issaquah parent and your child is hospitalized, the last thing you want to do is to fight the 520 bridge to see her before/after/during work. In a hectic hospital, kids need their parents as both advocates and sustainers. If you're a kid, you don't want to have to spend your school days trucking to endless follow-up appointments (or a long series of tests) across the lake. Long distance travel discourages consistency in follow-up and ongoing care. Just a fact of our transportations mess. The out-patient clinics the Hospital plans to add are helpful, but they do not fix the problem of accessibility of in-patient care & follow-up.

Define "critical mass." The hospital claims that it won''t have "critical mass" for a second in-patient site. At the same time, it proposes adding 350 beds to the 250 it already has at one site, for a total of 600. Why wouldn't 350 beds be sufficient to establish a second site? The current site had 200 beds until only recently.

Publicly evaluate trade-offs of a second site. Yes, initial startup size at the second site might be a challenge and a trade-off, but it would be temporary. As for proximity to the UW, it's time to talk about technologies that let doctors participate in research seminars on campus via teleconferencing. Yes, doctors would sacrifice convenience with two campuses, but patients would gain better access to care. And a 350 bed hospital would certainly be self-sustaining, so cross-lake trips for doctors should not be a daily activity.

Publicly evaluate potential partnerships with other hospitals. To improve the accessibility of beds while making the most of scarce resources, could Children's add a pediatric wing to an existing--or new-- adult hospital? Yes, highly specialized care might remain located in Laurelhurst, but less-specialized care could be offered closer to kids' homes. Thinking out-of-the-box, could Children's partner with another hospital to co-locate adult and pediatric beds during the start-up phase for a new site, converting all beds to pediatric use in the long-term?

We ask: Is it possible to put the beds where the kids are?

[Update: Please note:

• The Overlake site is most certainly not in Issaquah. We've heard of a letter from a hospital-paid legal team that claims that it is. Overlake is on the border of Bellevue & Redmond & right next to 520, as shown in the map above.
• This post mentions Issaquah because of the Hospital's efforts to kill the addition of a hospital there, including pediatric beds accessible to that area. It is included as an example of how the Hospital needs to think more carefully about accessibility of care to patients.]