>Valley Expansion: You can have a better hospital without this plan. Valley’s entire history from its beginnings proves that
You can have a better hospital without this plan. Valley’s entire history from its beginnings proves that. There was never an expansion done anywhere near the size of the current proposal. Yet plenty of expansion and modernization was surely done over the years. Many more specialty areas were added over the years since Valley began,too.
Remember, Valley started as the entire hospital’s footprint being what’s now the doctor parking lot on Linwood. Phillips- now the oldest building– greatly expanded the hospital when it was built. Then Bergen followed, then Cheel.
Also bear in mind as to Ridgewood, the host community, our population really has not changed greatly in size throughout most of Valley’s existence.
What you probably can NOT have without this plan though is a big regional medical center that attracts patients and their doctors from all over.
That’s not a reasonable definition of “serving the community” to me, unless you define “community” as basically the entire tri-state area and perhaps beyond that.
This area has a lot of facilities to choose from.. and in fact many providers who practice at Valley offer their patients other choices for procedures than only Valley.
For one very specialized procedure, a local close friend was recently offered a choice of either Clara Maas or Valley. The specialist surgeon who performed the procedure has offices in both Ridgewood and the Clara Maas area.
The patient chose Valley, but the doctor also commented that Clara Maas was every bit as good as Valley in terms of services for the procedure needed, and that actually more such procedures are done there than at Valley, not just by that provider, but overall in NJ.
When Pascack was open, even more choices were available and many docs practicing at Valley were also listed as having privileges at Pascack.
If you do lookups of Valley physicians at the Valley site and then go look up that provider individually, you’ll find that many (and likely most) have privileges at multiple hospitals. Some doctors on the Valley site have a feature you can directly click for more info about their practice, too – and among those, you’ll also find most have multiple hospital affiliations — in fact quite a few continue to list “Pascack” as an affiliation.
So, just like many docs have multiple offices, they also have multiple affiliations with hospitals. Quite a few on the Valley directory also practice from Hackensack too.
Thus, with a plan that provided for some modernization but not the “regional med center” model, you could have the advantage of a “renewed” Valley while still having something sensible in terms of its fit with the site and within the Village as its host community.
It’s hard for me to understand how patients or overall care will suffer if the proposed plan is not built, when so many doctors who practice at Valley also practice elsewhere, and will likely continue to also practice at Valley.
If the current Valley is so “behind the times” as the “experts” seem to testify, why are so many of those same leading area doctors practicing there at all, given that so many of them have other area hospital privileges?
I’m all for them tearing down the old Phillips building and doing some modernizing.. but you don’t need this plan for that. Something more modest would clearly satisfy that need – just as Valley’s previous updates have been able to do.
.