How Easton hospital is recovering from lingering neglect
Like the mythological Greek bird, the phoenix, which rises in new life from the ashes, Easton’s namesake hospital is once again stable, with a renewed commitment to serve its community.
This is the hospital where I launched my surgical career and planned to remain throughout it. But as the saying goes, the best laid plans often go awry.
Under for-profit ownership over the previous two decades, Easton Hospital lost ground in the Lehigh Valley’s competitive health care marketplace. As a vascular surgeon who started his career with this institution, I found witnessing the hospital’s steady slide to be extremely distressing.
was 1983 when I arrived as a surgical intern at Easton Hospital, energized and eager to learn. The hospital, on South 21st Street, was beautiful and bustling. It was well equipped and staffed with skilled doctors, nurses and other clinicians and administrators.
We were impassioned, striving to make a very good institution even better, where community members, of all ethnicities, races and socioeconomic levels, could receive excellent care.
I remember much of it like it was yesterday. I operated on countless patients in the next four years of my general surgery residency at Easton, thriving on the experience of saving lives, developing collegiality and forging friendships with patients and staff.
I left to complete a vascular surgery fellowship at Boston University Medical Center and then returned to join the Vascular Surgery group based at the hospital, a group that I’m proud to be part of today. We shared our mission to heal the sick and injured.
It was exciting and optimistic to celebrate Easton Hospital’s 100th anniversary with the community and colleagues in 1990. We rededicated ourselves to the institution and its seemingly bright future.
I enjoyed training future vascular surgeons who, I realized, would be carrying on when my partners and I hung up our scalpels and white coats sometime in the distant future.
Fast forward to the 21st century. Many hospitals, especially those in urban settings with relatively substantial un- or underinsured populations, have struggled to bring in enough money to cover their costs.
Easton Hospital sought relief through a new financial model. In
2001, after more than a century as a nonprofit, Easton Hospital agreed to be bought by for-profit Community Health Systems of Brentwood, Tenn., for $118 million. Then in 2017, CHS sold the hospital along with seven others to Steward Health Care, which was based in Boston at the time but has since moved to Dallas.
Though we felt increasingly like outsiders with the new owners, my partners and I remained loyal to the hospital, our patients and the community over the course of these transitions.
Then, at the height of the initial COVID-19 surge last year, Steward Health Care concluded Easton Hospital was no longer viable. It was time to shut it down.
Just in the nick of time, St. Luke’s University Health Network stepped in and stepped up.
Without St. Luke’s intervention, rumors of the hospital’s imminent demise would surely have come true — with devastating impact for the greater Easton area just when the community needed the hospital most.
The renaissance of St. Luke’s Easton Campus, as the hospital is now known, commenced immediately under St. Luke’s management. The emergency department is once again bustling, and recently refurbished operating rooms are now filled with surgeries. The network’s COVID-19 Monoclonal Antibody Clinic is based at the campus.
As St. Luke’s Easton Campus, the hospital has reassumed its leadership role in the community. In collaboration with Two Rivers Health & Wellness Foundation, campus leadership is working to enhance access to health care, healthy foods and wellness education programs in the Easton area.
Meanwhile, St. Luke’s athletic trainers contribute their skills and enthusiasm on school sports fields.
Other recent Easton Campus initiatives address the needs of area families. For example, a 16-bed inpatient unit for teens struggling with serious behavioral health challenges will open in the hospital this fall.
Staff at the hospital again look toward the hospital’s future with optimism. It reminds me of the excitement I felt 38 years ago when my surgical career was just beginning. When I looked ahead, I saw only great possibilities.