Dear Readers,

Elected leaders in Boothbay, Boothbay Harbor and Southport pledged this week to fight the closure of St. Andrews Emergency Room. If you asked Freddie Luke for her opinion, she would say: “Welcome aboard.”

Frederica McIlwain Luke, the feisty retired East Boothbay health care worker is hopping mad. So mad, she started a one woman protest that morphed into a demonstration Sunday when 14 or so folks stood on the street near Hannaford’s market holding homemade signs bearing a red heart. A lot of motorists honked their support for her cause.

She said she chose the heart as the symbol of her protest because it was the very slogan adopted by St. Andrews officials to demonstrate the hospital’s commitment to the community. The St. Andrews HEART is supposed to stand for: Honesty, Excellence, Access, Respect, Teamwork and Service. 

That, she explains, is just what the hospital’s board should have considered when they voted to close the St. Andrews Emergency Room.

As you can see from our Letters to the Editor pages, the decision has broken our community’s HEART.

Almost 16 years ago, when MaineHealth signed a deal to affiliate with St. Andrews Hospital they signed a commitment to maintain at “a minimum 24-hour emergency services, outpatient care services and long-term care services in the Boothbay Harbor region as part of its system, unless the St. Andrews board shall in its discretion determine in the future that any such services, as contemplated by the parties, are no longer necessary and appropriate.”

That was a promise. They gave their word - their word. They pledged to maintain 24-hour emergency services. They did not say they would maintain services unless there was a problem with, say, fewer patient visits, the cost of services, Medicare reimbursement, quality of service or any of the other technical terms that Lincoln County Health now says drove the decision. They gave their word to maintain a 24-hour emergency service. “Unless it is no longer necessary and appropriate.” And now it is no longer necessary or appropriate.

The relationship between a community and its community hospital is much like that of a patient and a doctor. 

We are not physicians or nurses. We are merchants and fishermen, housewives and shipbuilders, inn keepers, clerks and even scribblers. About one in five of us are retired. We know about running businesses, building boats and baking blueberry pies. We are good at catching lobsters, working with wood, and catering to the needs of tourists who visit our communities. But we are not doctors.

Although we are hammered by TV ads telling us that this drug will do that, and that drug will make us feel like we are 25 again (and look like we did at 25) we know better. But we know that disease and injury are facts of in our lives. We have seen our friends and family, neighbors and co-workers, good folks, and those that were not so good, get injured, sick and die. To battle these ailments, we turn to doctors and to hospitals

That is why we place our trust and lives in the hands of our friends and neighbors who have studied medicine, passed rigorous requirement posed by professional boards, and earned the right to be called Doctor or Nurse or run a hospital. We respect these professionals and pay them well, as a tribute to their skills and judgment. We trust them to care for us and for our families.

We believed and trusted that our St. Andrews Hospital would be there to take care of us too. After all they gave us their word, and the symbol of that word was: HEART. It stood for Honesty, Excellence, Access, Respect, Teamwork and Service.

And now they have broken that promise. And our HEARTS.

Joe Gelarden