A few years ago, Carla Sageth was in high school, and she was dying. Her lungs were wasting away. Doctor after doctor at clinic after clinic diagnosed asthma and sent her on her way. She became unable to walk, and still her mom, who had no insurance, kept trying to find a doctor who could put Carla right. Finally one of them just told Carla and her mother that Carla’s was a very bad case of asthma, in fact, so bad that it would kill her in a few months.
That was when Carla finally made it to the pediatric unit at Ben Taub. Doctors there weren’t content with the asthma diagnosis, and their misgivings were correct. In fact, Carla was suffering from bronchiectasis, and that diagnosis saved her life.
Today, Sageth told her story with tears in her eyes in front of a jam-packed meeting of the board of the Harris County Hospital District, which recently announced plans to shutter the Ben Taub Pediatrics unit.
HCHD says they need the unit’s 31 beds for adult patients, and that the
pediatrics unit is often underused at certain times of year. (Demand
for the beds waxes in winter flu season and wanes in the hotter
months.) Closure of Ben Taub’s pediatrics unit is just one option
among many, an HCHD spokesman said, including consolidating operations
with LBJ hospital (at either campus) and some sort of “public-private
interface.”
Doctors at the pediatrics unit say any elimination
of children’s beds would be a mistake for a multitude of reasons. From
the lectern at the board meeting and again at a press conference on the
oak-shaded front lawn of HCHD HQ on Holly Hall Street, former Ben Taub
pediatrician Kathy King and several of her colleagues pointed out that
theirs is one of only three pediatric intensive care units in Houston.
King added that the pediatrics unit is absolutely vital to the training
of pediatric doctors in a multitude of disciplines.
King is
chairwoman of the board of Doctor’s For Change, a group that advocates
for just and universal healthcare. She added that Ben Taub’s pediatrics
unit is a prime source of health care for Houston’s uninsured and
underinsured population, a number that already stands at 200,000 and
grows with each day our economy continues its slide. Even now, they are
starting to see families from higher up the economic ladder than ever,
people who never expected to set foot in any part of that fearsome hulk
of a hospital some call “The Tub.”
While HCHD can point to
numbers that prove that LBJ and Ben Taub at times do not operate at
maximum efficiency, it must be remembered that efficiency is in the eye
of the beholder. HCHD’s view is based on the realities of today, and
even at that, doesn’t take into account the doctors’ contentions about
Ben Taub’s value as a teaching venue. But even in bottom line terms
HCHD’s view doesn’t make much sense. In this time of economic sorrow,
the truly efficient decision would be the one that looks toward the
grim likelihoods of tomorrow.
Nor does it take into account the happy outcomes, like Sageth’s, of yesterday.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2009.
