Part I: Life Falling Apart.
Part II: Carpet Pieces
Part III: Please, anything but hospitals!

By Nick Jacobs

After working in health care management for eight years, the opportunity came for me to assume a hospital presidency. We also won’t discuss the fact that my election to this position was by a one-vote majority.

The hospital was nearly one hundred years old, was started by a coal mining company to take care of its workers. When Western Pennsylvania coal went out of style due to high pollution levels, the hospital and the town also fell out of favor.

The population dropped from 12,000 to 4,500, and my first visit to the facility revealed PeptoBismol looking pink, painted walls, indoor outdoor carpeting in the maternity area with duct tape over the torn sections, furniture that looked like a bad sequel to the Brady Bunch, snow leaking through the windows of the conference room and a bottom line generated almost completely by not paying the employees an appropriate salary.

The hospital is seven miles away from nearly a four hundred bed tertiary care center in a fiercely competitive area where the population has continued to drop precipitously for the past three decades. The other trait not unfamiliar to areas such as this is that, because the population has dropped so dramatically, the wealthy have fought to remain in control financially and politically at whatever cost to and, most times to the determent of the area.

The hospital needed a vision, and that vision was one that had been part of me since my walks along the streets of East Liberty with Pittsburgh Press paper bag slung snugly over my shoulder. It was to become a hospital that was owned and used by the people in a way that would not only save their lives in an emergency, but would save their quality of life on a daily basis.

My commitment to public health was well documented, and my commitment to courtesy, service and cleanliness were always present. To convert this old, tired coal mining hospital into the hospital of the future as stated by Donna Shalala on her visit to Windber, PA two years ago, would take an inordinate amount of work and some luck.

The Planetree philosophy of care was a topic of my studies at both Carnegie Mellon and Harvard, and, although it was dismissed as too soft by the business professors, it was truly an answer that was waiting to be discovered. Planetree was the Sycamore tree under which Hypocrites lectured. More importantly, it is a belief in patient centered care.

“Planetree embraces the concept that the mind and body are intricately interrelated and that healing must address the needs of the mind and spirit as well as the body. All facets of the Planetree model – open communication, patient choices, family/friend involvement, music, art, massage, architecture, use of complementary therapies, and others – work to uphold this concept.

Because the hospital had a hospice, it was relatively easy to convince the board that the need existed to be kind, caring, compassionate, loving, and nurturing to patients. Why not?