Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

What does reputation laundering on the cheap look like for an entity with over $16 billion in annual revenue?

Mayo Clinic reported adding $1.3 billion to its assets in the first nine months of last year. In December it got a heartwarming front page story in the Albert Lea Tribune for giving a microscopic 0.002% of that surplus to a community program in Albert Lea.

No shade to the backpack program and the community members who fundraise for it and coordinate it. My beef is that this donation is less than a pittance to Mayo Clinic.

This $25,000 donation represents a fraction of the costs that Mayo Clinic has shifted to our patients by moving vital services out of our community. Mayo Clinic is helping to provide food in kids’ backpacks but it shut down the highly valued, award-winning Baby Place four years ago. There isn’t even a pediatrician for children at Mayo’s Albert Lea clinic right now.

I’ve previously written about the many cities that our patients are being transferred to other than Austin and Rochester due to staffed bed shortages. Last month I learned of a local patient who was sent to Lake City for hospitalization, and shortly after that I learned of another patient sent to New Prague.

Lake City is 100 miles from Albert Lea and has 5,300 people. New Prague is 75 miles away and has 8,300 people.

Albert Lea has 18,500 people. It has more people than New Prague and Lake City combined. These two smaller cities both have hospitals, but our city does not. “Our hospital” is supposed to be 23 miles away in Austin, but there are too often no beds available, and this has been going on for months.

Albert Lea and Austin have about 45,000 people combined. Mayo is a flush hospital system, and there are often no beds available at its hospital serving two cities with a combined population equal to Mankato’s.

Sending our patients to these smaller towns may make sense to Mayo as it extracts money from our community to build up its medical mecca in Rochester, but it makes little sense to the critically ill people who are getting shipped around southeast Minnesota like packages.

These patients’ families incur higher travel costs and more lost wages to visit their loved ones in the hospital and then transport them home.

How much does it cost to get a ride home if no family or friends can provide one? One patient from Albert Lea recently paid $249 for a van ride home after a hospital stay in Rochester.

These transportation needs should be quantified by our community leaders so that they can adequately respond to them. I asked Mayo for numbers of patients that are being sent to hospitals other than Austin, and I was told that Mayo does not give these numbers to individuals.

Under the Local Public Health Act, it is the business of our elected leaders to find out this information so that they can meet community needs such as gaps in transportation, and I hope they will obtain these numbers from Mayo.

Furthermore, I am concerned about patients not receiving basic care at Austin’s hospital. Three people have told me that they or their spouses did not get bathed while hospitalized in Austin. One person said their spouse wasn’t turned at regular intervals after surgery.

This patient reportedly left Mayo’s hospital in Austin with no bath and two bed sores. Bed sores are one of 29 reportable adverse health events under Minnesota law.

If you or your loved one has experienced a serious lapse in safety like this, please speak up. You can file a complaint with the Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals. The link is: https://apps.jointcommission.org/QMSInternet/IncidentEntry.aspx.

Furthermore, at the state level, you can contact MDH’s Office of Health Facility Complaints. The link is https://www.health.state.mn.us/facilities/regulation/ohfc/filecomp.html or call 844-880-1574.

If any of these situations have happened to you, please let your elected officials know. I believe that what I’ve learned so far is the tip of the iceberg, and our leaders’ awareness of the problem is incomplete.

Whenever you hear excuses here about “the challenges of rural health care” remember that Mayo has the resources to overcome them. Besides a substantial operating margin, Mayo has billions in investments and billions from its for-profit side.

Mayo could provide adequate staffing to Mayo Clinic Health System services. Mayo chooses not to.

It’s a disgrace for Mayo to pull away health care services in our community we depend on, especially as we age. A trifling amount of Mayo’s largesse to a community program is no remedy for this burden.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.