It’s easy for Mayor Vincent Gray and various city budget experts to say the United Medical Center simply does not add up. They’re right: The hospital on the city’s eastern border with Prince George’s County has been a drag on the general fund. Gray says the hospital should be in private hands, rather than being the city’s responsibility. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi notes that UMC is in the red and is likely to rely on city subsidies for years. Keeping the public hospital on the city’s books threatens his coveted bond rating. Catania’s Folly, city council members call it, after its savior, at-large member David Catania.
Before they dismiss the hospital — make fun of its dead elevators, deride its historic low levels of care and daylong waits for emergency room service — the naysayers should visit UMC.
They would see a medical facility that’s still staggering in some places, but it’s also showing glimmers of becoming a first-rate health care facility for those who need it most.
On a visit to the maternity ward a few weeks ago, nurse Yvonne Bellosi walked me into a quiet room with three newborns. One was hooked up to a monitor. “Why?,” I asked. “We detected PCP in her blood,” she says.
PCP, as in angel dust. As in love boat. As in one of the most destructive drugs on the street, the one that might make a woman throw her baby from a window. Caring for this infant is exactly why D.C. needs a public hospital in Ward 8.
Catania knows this. Let’s agree Catania is a zealot when it comes to UMC. But sometimes it takes someone driven by uncommon devotion and passion to champion an unpopular cause. Catania will bridle at the zealot brand; he says he’s on solid medical and fiscal ground to make UMC work without subsidies. He’s a zealot, trust me.
Last summer he called Dr. Janis Orlowski, chief medical officer at Washington Hospital Center, and “prodded” her to open an obstetrics unit at UMC.
“The idea was to bring the doctors to the babies, not the babies to the doctors,” Catania tells me.
On Feb. 1 Orlowski’s teams started to set up shop at UMC. They will do births, offer prenatal care, work to stem teen pregnancies.
“It’s our belief that it is important for UMC to be successful in those wards of the city,” Orlowski tells me. “If it’s not there, it puts stress on the entire system.”
Catania also convinced Children’s Hospital to establish a pediatric emergency room at UMC. He’s basically forcing quality care to come east of the Anacostia River.
“You can argue with Dave,” Orlowski says, “but he’s correct: We must find a way to serve poor people. Closing D.C. General was fiscally prudent, but it didn’t absolve D.C. from providing care for that population.”
Catania believes UMC can become self-sustaining. Orlowski and others have their doubts. But they know one thing: “We need everyone working on it together: the mayor, the council, the medical community.
It’s worth the risk, for the babies and the children.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
