Please voice your opinion and sign this petition if you believe the following:

“I believe every patient has the right to choose their trusted physician to guide their treatment plan during hospitalization. I request the NCH Hospital Board of Trustees to reconsider their admissions policy to ensure that community physicians can retain their admitting privileges”

 Under a new proposed policy at Naples Community Hospital (NCH) your Primary Care or Concierge medicine physician will not be able to admit you to the hospital if you need it, nor will he or she be able to write orders, choose consultants, or coordinate your discharge. Your existing medical care team that knows you best will be a “VISITOR”. The hospital system will re-assign you a new doctor. This new policy infringes on your fundamental right to choose who will direct your care while hospitalized.

In addition, NCH will eliminate current staff-privileged non-NCH employed hospitalist teams and replace them with their newly hired NCH employed hospitalists. Historically NCH has granted privileges to independent and community-based hospitalists alike that are working collaboratively with your Primary Care or Concierge Medicine doctor. Many current independent hospitalists have access to your medical records from the office in order to provide continuity of care while you are in the hospital. The forthcoming hired NCH hospitalists do not have access to these records. This model has been presented as an improvement so you can be treated quickly and discharged sooner based on a small “pilot” trial with a small number of patients. This was in part achieved by ramping up ancillary staff to work with the NCH hospitalists on the pilot floor only. The same ancillary support was withheld from the independent doctors/hospitalists (not employed by NCH) to be able to achieve equal or even better results.

Any consulted specialists will also be dictated by the NCH hospitalist, not your Primary Care team. NCH appears to be moving systematically towards a closed medical staff system. They have initially prohibited all non-employed primary care teams, concierge doctors and hospitalists from admitting patients to the “pilot” floor. Slowly this will be rolled out floor by floor until the goal of a closed system is completed.

Under these constraints to the Medical staff, NCH will no longer exist as a “community hospital”.  Today more than 700 physicians, independent and employed work collaboratively for the best care of patients.  We must work together to stop this misguided policy from moving forward.