The three front-page news stories in today’s Virginia Gazette have a common theme – barriers to the provision of affordable and accessible healthcare in southeastern Virginia.
The first story – above-the-fold – is about Brooke Byrd, a graduate of one of the local high schools who has followed through on her passion to make healthcare more accessible. It recounts her story of graduating from Warhill High School in 2013, graduating as valedictorian from Christopher Newport University four years later with a degree in physics, and being awarded a Ph.D. in medical physics (who knew?) from Dartmouth this month. Her story is inspiring. She was motivated to enter this field when her aunt died of breast cancer while Brooke was in her teens. Over the next three years, she’ll be doing a surgical residency (along with the medical students) at the University of Pennsylvania.
One of the things I like about this story is that it features a young woman who is simply going about the job of creating the best life for herself and for her community. There are millions of people like this (not all of them who function at the level we see in this story, to be fair). But they don’t get the recognition that the shallow social media influencers attain by posing for pictures. I like the fact that the Gazette gives her story top honors featuring her top honors in today’s paper.
The second story is about the Old Towne Medical & Dental Center, which provides medical services to clients regardless of their ability to pay. It is a public-private nonprofit with 44 full-time and part-time employees, as well as 35-40 volunteers. This includes five nurse practitioners, an optometrist, and a dental director. This is another sort of “unsung heroes” story.
Some of the volunteers are specialists, such as cardiologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists, who work at other practices but volunteer their time at Olde Towne. A friend of mine (a retired cardiologist) used to volunteer one day a week. He loved his work, and in retirement he wanted to continue helping people without having to worry about the pressure of seeing patients and earning money. This center gave him just the opportunity he was looking for.
The woman I’m working with at Literacy for Life (an asylum seeker from Russia) arrived in the US with almost no resources. The conditions of her asylum process restricted her from working for more than a year after she got here, and she and her children needed medical care. Old Towne was the solution to their problems. In addition, the center is the only provider of adult dental Medicaid in the area. This article highlights a recent event called “Give Kids a Smile,” which focused on dental care for children.
The third article doesn’t focus on healthcare so directly, but it touches on the whole issue of emergency services, which includes the life-saving availability of emergency care. This story is about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, an 18-mile crossing of the Chesapeake Bay that was identified as one of the “Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World.” A quick look at a map illustrates the importance of this bridge to the economy of Virginia and the rest of the east coast.
The story focuses on a truck driver who lost control of his tractor-trailer on the bridge and plummeted over the side to his death. The story concludes that the safety barriers are not adequate for the truck traffic that uses the bridge. Two other major bridges in the region – the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel and the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge tunnel – both have stronger barriers that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. According to the story, there have been 17 over-the-side accidents since 1984. It would be cost-prohibitive to upgrade the barriers, as the necessary concrete barriers are too heavy for the bridge to support.
One tragic part of this story – the trucker’s girlfriend gave birth to their child the day after the accident.
So what does this have to do with health care? I think the failure to maintain infrastructure has the same root as the inability to fund health care. It’s expensive to do things the right way, even if you know the result will be both efficient and effective. Government budgets are approved on a yearly basis, and demands to “balance the budget” often stand in the way of investment expenditures. So we have trucks that go over the side and children who can’t get their teeth fixed. All of today’s stories show, I think, that our funding priorities are out of whack.
Agree. Out of whack for sure.