Shelby Baptist Medical Center heart program to continue

The five-year-old battle between Baptist Health System’s (BHS) Shelby Baptist Medical Center in Alabaster and Brookwood Medical Center in Birmingham ended Jan. 6 with positive results, according to Beth O’Brien, president and CEO of BHS.
    
Shelby Baptist will now be able to move forward with its application for a certificate of need for the open-heart surgery program it has offered since August 2004, O’Brien said.
    
According to The Birmingham News, Brookwood has argued that an open-heart program at Shelby Baptist diminishes the quality of Birmingham’s seven existing programs. 
    
“When you are talking about a service that is as specialized and important as cardiac care, more open-heart programs are not better,” Garry Gause, Brookwood’s president and CEO, wrote in a letter to the editor in the News Jan. 3.
    
But current state guidelines say that a hospital in a county with more than 150,000 people without an open-heart surgery program needs one regardless of existing services in nearby counties, the News reported. Shelby Baptist meets that requirement.
    
In a fight to save the program, BHS launched a weeklong media blitz in late December about lives being put at risk if the Shelby program is shut down.
    
On Jan. 6, O’Brien announced that BHS and Brookwood reached an agreement over the dispute. 
    
“This agreement is an extremely positive development for our organization and the communities we serve,” she said.
    
As part of the agreement, Brookwood will withdraw its opposition to the open-heart program at Shelby Baptist, and BHS will no longer oppose Brookwood’s $54 million modernization and expansion project, O’Brien said.
    
“Baptist’s 84-year health care ministry has always been, and will continue to be, responsive to the needs of those we serve,” she said. “Our heart program at Shelby Baptist, established to meet the needs of rapidly growing communities in Shelby, Bibb and Chilton counties, is just one example of that commitment.
    
“Those communities have been overwhelmingly supportive of our efforts and we are pleased that we will continue meeting the heart care needs of those who choose Shelby Baptist for heart care,” O’Brien said.
    
With construction now underway at several BHS hospitals, including Shelby, “this is an exciting time for each of our hospitals,” she said. (TAB)