Just what do people want from DRMC?

Once again, Danville’s political leaders are being asked to address complaints about Danville Regional Medical Center.

For the members of Danville City Council, those complaints are an ongoing problem without an easy solution. All the city can do is raise issues and ask questions.

Danville Mayor Sherman Saunders has accumulated a 10-page list of questions for the hospital’s leaders about everything from the Emergency Department to staffing and experience levels of doctors and nurses to whether Danville Regional is a community hospital.

“We’re not trying to run the hospital. We’re not trying to tell the hospital what to do,” Saunders said. “We’re simply saying citizens want answers and would you be kind enough to answer their questions.”

One ongoing controversy involves waiting times in the hospital’s Emergency Department, a complaint that predates the sale of DRMC to LifePoint Hospitals Inc. in 2005.

People have an expectation of how long they or a loved one should have to wait to be seen, treated and released from Danville Regional’s Emergency Department. It hurts DRMC when local people hear that the waiting times are shorter at other hospitals in surrounding communities.

The trouble with those comparisons, of course, is that patients in the waiting room of any hospital’s Emergency Department have no way of knowing if they’re cooling their heels because far more serious injuries and illnesses are being treated “back there” or if a hospital deliberately understaffed its Emergency Department.

But it’s clear from years of complaints about Danville Regional’s Emergency Department that local people want fast service, regardless of how many others are being treated or how serious their injuries and illnesses or how well the hospital is staffed or any other consideration. The anecdotal stories of faster service at the next hospital down the road have built the permanent impression that something isn’t being done correctly here.

We believe hospital CEO Jerel Humphrey when he says, “We live here. We take care of our patients here. It’s here. It’s all local.” Humphrey appears to genuinely care about improving the local hospital.

Perhaps the next step for Danville Regional is to create the premier Emergency Department in the Dan River Region, one that takes care of the big cases, the charity cases and all the other cases in what the public considers speedy time — every time.