AMC a light in the Valley

On the still-sparkling campus of the Augusta Medical Center, set in Fishersville facing the Blue Ridge Mountains, the residue from the battle that preceded the hospital’s opening 15 years ago long since has been swept away. Superlatives frequently are applied to the 255-bed facility, widely regarded among the central Shenandoah Valley’s brightest gems and considered by experts in the health care industry among the South Atlantic’s finest community hospitals.

AMC’s reputation in the community is a testament to many things done right. Consolidation is a trend everywhere these days given the economic climate and the growing need for efficiency wherever it can be found, but the contractions began in the health care industry almost a generation ago. The result has been massive attrition among community hospitals, such as those in Waynesboro and Staunton replaced by AMC.

In more than a few small towns along the eastern seaboard, the change has yet to be fully welcomed. The loss of local hospitals in many of these places translates to a peeling away of local identity. The regional hospitals that have sprung up in place of local facilities are disparaged as plastic and impersonal, like Wal-Mart supplanting the local hardware store or the reverse of the old “Cheers” TV theme song, places where nobody knows your name.

Somehow, AMC successfully has navigated the tumult that shuttering local hospitals invariably produces and carved a reputation as a provider that offers regionalism’s distinct advantages within a modern, advanced facility while retaining the feel of a community hospital. AMC has pulled in new physicians to the region, added services and staff and eliminated the duplication that prevails when two local hospitals are located within 15 miles of one another.

The latest development at AMC is an unfolding plan to expand services, starting with the search announced last week for three cardiologists to perform procedures such as catheterizations, stents and angioplasty. Patients needing such intervention now have to make the drive to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville. But recent technological advances, paired with decreased costs, have allowed community hospitals to provide higher levels of cardiac care, and AMC is climbing aboard.

That’s especially pleasing to hear for heart patients in the Valley, for whom the trip across Afton Mountain sometimes is regarded as an unpleasant journey to another world. The move also has larger symbolic implications. It is an indicator of the growing strength of AMC as a regional health care provider, and there is a value in that trend that supporters of local hospitals should recognize.

By luring in more doctors — cardiologists and others – who will come not only to work here but to settle here, not as faceless commuters but as people who are part of the community’s fabric, AMC is not only improving its level of care but bolstering its already strong sense of community.

Further, AMC has shown the central Valley that regionalism can work, provided it is crafted in the spirit of preserving communities and enhancing them rather than nibbling away at their unique local identities. That lesson is important in towns such as Waynesboro and Staunton, where robust senses of place sometimes verge on provincialism capable of hindering growth in both communities and the larger one.

With good cause, another regional entity, the Greater Augusta Chamber of Commerce on Thursday named AMC its business of the year. Both organizations have shown that thinking regionally can draw communities together rather than divide them. As its 15th year progresses, AMC, we expect, will continue to light that path as well as increase its might as a community health care provider. Both are good things for the Valley.