Harvard Professor discusses impact of hospital closures

Pending any changes, Trumbull Regional Medical Center, and Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital will be closing on September 19th. Two significant blows to Trumbull County.
Harvard professor Dr. Soroush Saghafian says among the obvious factors are the impact it has on immediate access to medical care, but also, to the communities themselves.
"The other aspect of hospital closures that impacts the community is that in a lot of areas, these are the main sources of income for people that live there.", he added.
Dr. Saghafian also pointed out that physicians at these facilities would have to uproot--and depending on their network and contract situation--that could be challenging. Additionally this would force patients to go to other hospitals for treatment and in essence, could reduce the quality of care at those facilities.
"What this means is that they have to spend less time with each patient that they have to serve because again they have the same capacity, but a lot more patients to serve."
More patients may seem like more profit for hospitals taking in these new patients but that may not be the case.
"Depending on the insurance that these new patients have--a lot of them are on Medicare or Medicaid, where the profits for the hospitals are very low.", Saghafian added.