by Joe Fitzgerald

What can you do that’s worth $1,900? Can you do it in an hour?

I’d have to be paid $4 a word to make that much from this post, but I’m a fast writer. And then I’d have to write several thousand posts a year to make as much as a hospital administrator, which is what this column is about.

I have no idea what the schedule is for Sentara’s chief executive. All I know about him – I couldn’t tell you his name on a bet – is that he makes close to $5.8 million a year. Suppose or imagine that he works 60 hours a week and has two weeks off. Those 3,000 hours are worth somewhere north of $1,900 each to somebody, presumably the Sentara board.

But Sentara is closing the pediatrics wing at what used to be Rockingham Memorial Hospital. It costs too much.

As state Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, has pointed out this week, parents of children needing hospitalization will have to deal with the logistics of travel to Charlottesville. That’s just one of the drawbacks. I agree with Mark on this one. That should be a clue to how bad it is. Anyone with even a surface knowledge of Valley politics in the last quarter century knows that if he and I are on the same page, then either one of us has lost his mind or the situation is dire.

Mark also points out it costs more to hire a pediatrician for Harrisonburg than for Charlottesville. It still costs significantly less than it does to hire a hospital administrator in Norfolk, apparently.

I don’t even know if the $1,900-an-hour man is a doctor. Maybe an MBA. That has to be worth more than a healer of children, doesn’t it?

Those who haven’t had to use or visit RMH since it left downtown could be excused for not knowing exactly where it is. The most prominent sign for most of us is at the corner of Port and Neff where the Sentara name is on the JMU fields. The fields are one of the fringe benefits offered to Northern Virginia’s 17-year-olds so they’ll come here instead of George Mason or VCU. They’re paid for in part by Sentara, and that part is big enough to get their name on a sign. Presumably that’s to buy the hospital good will in the community, although it seems they could do that more efficiently by treating sick children.

Sentara RMH has a PR person on site. When a group of citizens were sending food and snacks to nurses there during the pandemic, we sent them in the evening. That’s when a couple of nurses said they could do the most good. The PR person wanted us to make a delivery at noon so it could be turned into a publicity event. PR over pragmatism is one of the signs that an organization has gone corporate. That’s a code for valuing the good of the organization itself over its core mission.

When people were being intubated in the halls at RMH and other hospitals during the pandemic, it wasn’t publicists and administrators trying to keep them alive, and they weren’t being kept alive at the Sentara-sponsored JMU Fields.

I don’t know how much weight Mark Obenshain can throw or who might join him in the fight. But this is a good use of the pulpit a state senator has. Against him is a corporation whose CEO is being paid $1,900 an hour to close pediatric units. Wonder how much they’d pay him to keep them open.

Joe Fitzgerald is former mayor of Harrisonburg. This column is republished with permission from his blog Still Not Sleeping.