July 24, 2008
Roads to health
If the Hampton Roads region was a patient, the diagnosis would be mixed. New hospitals and expansions are here or on their way, but the region continues to struggle with obesity, chronic illnesses and mental health reform.
Building-wise, Riverside Health System will try, for the third year, to get approval for a new hospital in Williamsburg. Sentara Obici Hospital plans to add a 30-bed expansion and build a new hospital in Virginia Beach, while Bon Secours fights to build a 60-bed hospital in northern Suffolk after being denied recently by the state.
Those same three major health care companies — Bon Secours Hampton Roads Health System, Riverside Health System and Sentara Healthcare — continue to introduce cutting edge medical treatments to the area. Surgeons at the Bon Secours Heart Institute recently performed the region's first DAVID procedure, a complex cardiac repair. Riverside's gamma knife radiosurgery center allows for delicate brain surgery without a scalpel, and Sentara's Norfolk location introduced a new implant to help with neck pain and stiffness.
Hampton Roads is also home to some world-renowned doctors, including the infertility specialists at the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine and researchers at the Strelitz Diabetes Institutes in Norfolk. The Newport News-based Patient Advocate Foundation is nationally known for working with people to fight insurance denials.
But while the health care companies battle for new general-use hospital space, dwindling mental health facilities are struggling to house patients. Virginia's mental health policies gained national attention after the April 2007 campus shooting at Virginia Tech, and lawmakers spent the remainder of the year discussing reform.
In Hampton Roads, Eastern State Hospital cut 43 beds in 2002 and expects another round of cuts in 2010. When beds at state mental health sites have been eliminated in the past, the state shifted money to other programs that provided the same service. But with a tight state budget, local officials aren't counting on that money this time.
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