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Letters to Editor: In Hernando County, Oak Hill Hospital is a community gem

 
Published July 20, 2016

Hospital should have ponied up for road from which it will benefit | Dan DeWitt's June 24 column:

Oak Hill Hospital a community gem

We were very curious about why Dan DeWitt continues to grouse about Oak Hill Hospital not paying impact fees when the County Commission chose to eliminate them several years ago. Oak Hill Hospital continues to be one of the key engines of economic development in our community.

For example:

• The hospital currently employs more than 1,160 associates who earn an average of $72,748, including all wages and benefits. That is more than $84 million generated in this community that ripples threefold, and those high wages more than double the average in the community.

• The new Graduate Medical Education program currently employs 35 physician residents, each earning $50,000 per year, as well as the physician staff who combined earn more than half a million dollars. This totals more than $2.2 million each year.

• The GME program will include future programs in anesthesiology, general surgery, family medicine, emergency medicine and behavioral health. Within a few years, Oak Hill Hospital will employ nearly 100 new physician residents who will live in our community and spend millions of dollars each year supporting our local economy and residents.

• Oak Hill Hospital has invested in thousands of construction jobs over the past 10 years with a total capital investment into this community of more than $100 million, all of which benefit our residents through convenience and quality, such as our open-heart surgery program (the first and only program in the county), a 28-bed maternity unit, a robot-assisted surgical program, and 24/7 on-site radiology services and critical care physicians.

• Oak Hill Hospital has paid more than $21 million in taxes to the community since it opened in 1984. In 2015, the property tax bill for Oak Hill Hospital was $1,143,595.

• In 2015, Oak Hill Hospital donated $12.6 million in charitable care as well as $22,156 to local charities, and participated in numerous annual charitable campaigns, including our Thanksgiving Family Food Baskets and Christmas Angels programs, both of which benefit low-income families in our community.

These and our other commitments demonstrate Oak Hill Hospital's value to the community through the addition of construction jobs, new physician jobs, associate positions, taxes paid and capital investments, which far exceed any other private entity in our county. We are very proud of the ongoing contributions we make to this community.

We find it disingenuous for your writer to continue to focus on impact fees eliminated voluntarily by the Board of County Commissioners and to belittle our donation of land which is needed to create a road which further expands our economic development. Despite this repeated offense, we will continue striving to serve the residents of our community with the highest quality health care through expansion, charitable giving, and community partnerships.

Walter J. Szydlowski, Oak Hill Hospital founding member, current chair of the board of trustees