The Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission will be looking into the effects of the changes at St. Andrews Hospital & Healthcare Center in Boothbay Harbor.
The emergency department at St. Andrews is slated to be closed in April 2013 and be replaced by an urgent care center. The change will cause St. Andrews to lose its hospital status as it will no longer provide 24-hour care.
At the commission’s board meeting on Oct. 17, community members, members of the St. Andrews Task Force and representatives from Lincoln County Healthcare (the parent company of St. Andrews Hospital & Healthcare Center) provided information and answered questions relating to the hospital’s changes from the board.
“The purpose of the meeting was for…the full board to learn and listen” about the situation, said Mary Ellen Barnes, the commission’s economic and community development director.
Discussion at the meeting touched on a number of issues including transportation of patients along winter roads, increased traffic at Miles Memorial Hospital, and potential effects on choices by businesses and visitors if a hospital is no longer available on the peninsula.
Barnes said the commission is “interested in understanding the different impacts and looking ahead to see how we can invest our time and money to develop better services for the future.” However, she said, the depth and focus of the commission’s look at the St. Andrews issue is still being determined.
The commission is hoping Todd Gabe, a professor of economics at the University of Maine, will be able to assist with an economic impact study of the jobs lost from the closure of the hospital, Barnes said. That study would be “a very modest effort to document or estimate the economic impact from those job losses,” she said.
Gabe said he has discussed looking at numbers relating to the issue with the commission, but the breadth of a potential study hasn’t been determined.
The planning commission is going to be meeting with the St. Andrews Task Force to get the big picture and priorities for any studies down in writing, Barnes said. “The communities and the regional planning commission have been really concerned with the impacts that are going to come out of these changes.”
Questions are still being discussed about how to measure and study the various impacts and whether or not conclusions from similar studies in other parts of the country can be used, Barnes said.
Planning Commission chairman Dick McLean said the broader the scope of an inquiry, the fuzzier the data gets. The commission will be cautious about how it moves forward to ensure it provides reliable data, he said.
