Grace Cottage Hospital in Townshend, Vermont runs its entire emergency department with physician assistants and nurse practitioners, with no in-house emergency physician on staff. Their safety net has always been a video link to specialists at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, ready to help make life-or-death calls in real time. Now that link is being cut.

Dartmouth Health notified Grace Cottage on Friday that it plans to shut down its Tele-ICU and Tele-ED programs, remote care services that connect small, rural hospitals to critical care doctors and emergency physicians hundreds of miles away. Five Vermont hospitals rely on this care, including Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, and Mt. Ascutney Hospital.

"It really is a huge letdown and surprising," said Dr. Jennifer Zweig, Grace Cottage's chief medical officer, according to VTDigger. She said the hospital had no warning the shutdown was coming.

Dartmouth Health says the programs are too costly to keep running on their own, pointing to a $63.5 million operating deficit. But these same programs are marketed as reducing mortality rates, shortening ICU stays, and helping patients avoid costly transfers — exactly the kind of care rural Vermonters cannot afford to lose. Cutting them without a transition plan puts patients at risk the moment the cameras go dark.

Rural hospitals should not have to gamble on emergency coverage because a regional health network wants to close a budget gap. Dartmouth Health and Vermont's Green Mountain Care Board have the power to require a real transition plan, and secure funding, before any of these services shut down.

Sign the petition to demand Dartmouth Health keep rural telehealth running until every hospital has a real plan in place.