I was glad to recently read about the Westfield Memorial Hospital celebrating their 75th anniversary serving their community. But in a slightly larger rural community, Tri-County Hospital that served Gowanda for over six decades no longer exists. How do you explain this?

Hospitals, and the networks they are affiliated with, are businesses. Despite the “non-profit” legal fig leaf, some are a big businesses: like the giant University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Center (UPMC) which happens to be Pittsburgh’s largest employer and has “for profit” affiliates overseas.

Through a series of corporate shell mergers, Tri-County, as well as Lake Shore and Brooks hospitals came under their financial supervision. It was a UPMC official that decided that Tri-County not be rebuilt after the 2009 flood. It should come as no surprise to readers that the UPMC has the corporate conscience, if one exists, of a boa constrictor and the decision to close Tri-County and the attempt to close Lake Shore was, as “The Godfather” boss Michael said in the movie: “strictly business.”

Westfield Memorial Hospital faced the same pressures all small rural hospitals face. But as luck would have it, their network affiliation was with St. Vincent’s Hospital in Erie. St. Vincent’s has, thus far, escaped being swallowed by the UPMC. I wonder: would Westfield’s healthcare needs be adequately met if they were somehow “rightsized” along the lines of Gowanda’s current part time urgent care arrangements? The morale of the story: large hospital network monopolies can be hazardous to your health and that of your community.

While we read of the $71 million in state health grant dollars that have materialized to move the antiquated but fully functioning Brooks Hospital and its emergency room to a new building at a new location that many are complaining about, in the Gowanda area: the volunteer emergency squads, and the fire companies that back them, face immediate needs with severe manpower shortages as their time is tied up delivering patients to distant emergency rooms. Gowanda Fire Chief Nick Crassi observed in April: “We’ve been struggling for members, for the last five years it’s been really bad.”

In commenting on the North Collins Emergency Squad that currently has 13 members and has experienced last year 50 “dropped calls,” an impassioned North Collins Supervisor John Tobia asked: “Is it going to take someone to drop dead in order for us to do something?” (Sept. 4). It’s disheartening to read of these millions in taxpayer grant dollars about to be invested in these long term projects, when the immediate emergency health needs of the Gowanda area remain unaddressed.

Officials at the Kalieda Health Care network have expressed a desire to improve health care in northern Chautauqua and Cattaraugus county at the time affiliation plans for Lake Shore and TLC were announced. As we read that arrangements are being made for them to finally emerge from bankruptcy, it is my hope that, at last, there can be progress to upgrade Gowanda’s part time urgent care center to a 24/7 operation.

Upgrading it further to a centralized free standing emergency room to stabilize patients would do wonders to meet the emergency health care needs of Gowanda and its surrounding rural communities. To help accomplish this: a fully vetted health care building site bordering Gowanda donated to and owned by TLC on Route 39 sits waiting. In Gowanda: the noise of ambulances and helicopters promptly responding to the long neglected life or death needs of our families would be comforting and most welcomed.

William Cain is a Gowanda resident.