There’s a lot to be said for time away from home on a vacation. It’s a mental and physical break from work, a chance to raise our heads, look past the day-to-day and see the world around us.
Driving around in far-away places, you see populated communities with multimillion-dollar homes and other towns, frequently more remote and dotted with hardscrabble neighborhoods, where the living is hard.
Having just come back from one of those weeks, I was struck, yet again, by a commonality that people share regardless of where they are — the need for good healthcare. What got me thinking about it was looking down from a hiking trail 7,000 feet up, wondering what the biggest building was off in the distance in the town below. As I learned later, it was a hospital.
This happened more than once. It is hospitals, not city halls, libraries or the local McDonald’s, that really are the great equalizer in a community, bringing together all types of people who are sick or want to prevent illness. That’s an awesome responsibility, one the doctors or nurses caring for us don’t take lightly. The facilities also function as an economic engine because of the size of the workforce and the salaries, money put back into the community.
But the challenges at these hospitals are many and difficult to overcome: rising costs of the labor, supplies and technology needed to properly maintain hospitals and keep them profitable, staff burnout and turnover, uneven reimbursement, and lastly, outside ownership that may have very different priorities.
The need for care, particularly with an aging America and an uptick in some serious illnesses among younger generations, is growing more acute, but the look and shape of how that care is administered is changing. Patient towers continue to be built, but as our annual Construction and Design Survey found, the arms race for patients revolves around building or repurposing smaller healthcare centers that are in convenient locations, more specific in their purpose and more profitable.
Hospitals say patient needs are changing and there’s less call for inpatient care. In the future, there may be less obvious signs of a community’s access to care than looking down on it from a mountain. But so long as it’s there, and patient needs are kept front and center, we can find other things to focus on.
