Voter Guide:El Camino Hospital Board Voter Guide:El Camino Hospital Board (October 25, 2002)

By Candice Shih

Amid the rubble of the soured economy, one entity has stayed afloat: El Camino Hospital.

It's stayed strong with its endowment, boom time investments, and lack of indebtedness, said Mary Nichols, a member of the League of Women Voters who has been observing the hospital for about seven years.

However, despite being on strong financial footing, the hospital board will be facing serious decisions in the next four years.

One will be to rebuild the hospital, which does not currently meet state seismic safety standards.

Other issues include the recruitment of doctors and nurses to a relatively high-priced living area and managing staffing ratios. Nichols added that the nurses' contract and the housekeeping staff's feeling of being overworked are also concerns.

Four people have come forward for a seat on the board: incumbents Mark O'Connor and David Reeder, Bill James, and Laura Ferrer.

Los Altos resident Philip Green is also on the ballot but has dropped out of the race. "[The incumbents] have done a good job, and I'm really just too busy," he said.

Mark O'Connor

O'Connor, an eight-year veteran of the ECH board, has long been involved with the hospital. He did scrap labor on the old hospital building and worked in the hospital lab when he was a Stanford medical student.

O'Connor, 53, is a Sunnyvale resident and has been a physician for 21 years. He works at a community clinic in East San Jose.

He is running again to "complete what I've started." He joined the board prior to the hospital's privatization and saw it through its return to public control. The hospital's positive financial situation is something he's particularly proud of.

Rebuilding the hospital, however, is one of O'Connor's main goals. "It's a great hospital for 1950," he said of the current facility. A bond measure would be the best way to pay for new facilities, he added.

He is concerned with staffing issues, as well. A quarter of the physicians are 60 or older, and will soon need to be replaced. O'Connor suggested that the hospital recruit new independent doctors by helping them with student loans and housing and startup costs.

He added, however, that the current ratio of nurses to patients is "vastly better than everyone else." He advocates listening to the nurses' concerns of staffing levels while keeping in mind the hospital's financial status.

David Reeder

Reeder, a former member of the Los Altos City Council and Planning Commission, was appointed to his seat on the board three-and-a-half years ago.

Like O'Connor, Reeder, 59, is running to continue the work he's begun and to confront the next phase in getting the hospital rebuilt.

"The hospital is at a critical point now where we have got our financial situation up to the point where we can work on plans for rebuilding the hospital," said Reeder, an account manager at Sun Microsystems.

The next task is to determine how the project will be funded. Reeder conjectured that funds will come from both private and public investments.

Staffing ratios for nurses and physicians are also an issue for Reeder.

Physicians are aging and, because of managed care, their morale is dropping, he said. While the effects of managed care cannot be addressed, younger physicians must be recruited, he said.

Nurse staffing ratios "all depend on how much we can afford," he continued.

In addition, Reeder would like to enhance the hospital's heart surgery and oncology services.

Bill James

The two biggest issues for James, a patent attorney and mechanical engineer, are inclusion and accountability.

In his view, everyone who lives in the ECH community, including those who are undocumented, should have their needs met. One way to do that is to expand services such as RotaCare, a free clinic, and to expand outreach.

"The best thing is to do something in advance" such as enrolling families in subsidized programs, said James, 38.

Another issue of inclusion is meeting patients' language needs. "It's important that the hospital have the resources to deal with that reality," he said. A Mountain View resident, James is fluent in Spanish and currently volunteers at the St. Joseph the Worker Center.

He advocates increasing pay for hospital workers who have translation skills and are properly trained.

As a part of accountability, James said that board members should better assess community needs. They can do that by attending informal town meetings with neighborhood associations and PTAs, for example.

Furthermore, he said the board should disclose more of its financial information. Even though the hospital has an IRS exemption from stating how much it spends on administration costs as compared to operations, "it should voluntarily disclose."

Laura Ferrer

Ferrer said she doesn't have a problem with how the hospital is run. She is running for the ECH board because she wants to get involved in local community affairs.

The issues she wants to address are the budget, which she said should depend less on the public and more on donations, and alternative medicine.

Ferrer, a Mountain View resident and technical writer, has seen 30 different Chinese doctors. She said her husband, Allen Hacker, was treated by a licensed doctor with alternative medicine after diving for gold and coming up with a pulmonary fungal infection.

"What I would like to see happen is more attention to be paid and the medical establishment starting to gradually look at various alternative treatments as effective adjuncts," said Ferrer. "I'm pretty convinced that there are lots of remedies that may not be scientifically proven as being effective."

Acupuncture, guided visualization (in which patients use their minds to communicate with their bodies), and EDTA chelation (in which an amino acid attacks blocked arteries) are examples of alternative remedies.

Ferrer said if they are made more available and covered by insurance companies, then medical costs could go down.

"I'm not arrogant enough to tell doctors how to diagnose," she said. "(But) I take a really proactive approach to my health."
E-mail Candice Shih at cshih@mv-voice.com