Letter to Governor Taft: We Need Our AA's Back on the Job!
May 22, 2000 Perioperative Staff MetroHealth Medical Center 2500 MetroHealth Drive Cleveland, Ohio 44109 Governor Bob Taft
30th Floor
77 South High Street
Columbus, Ohio 43215-6117
[email protected]
Dear Governor Bob Taft,
We write to ask you to please help speed passage of legislation to get our Anesthesiologist Assistants back on the job with us here in the MetroHealth Operating Rooms. We refer specifically to Senate Bill 278 (Senators Drake-Fingerhut-Spada-Hagan) which includes provisions for our State to issue Certificates of Registration to appropriately qualified individuals to practice as Anesthesiologist Assistants.
We were compelled to abruptly dismiss our Anesthesiologist Assistant colleagues last Tuesday, May 16, 2000, in response to a letter from the President of our Ohio State Medical Board, Carol L. Egner, M.D., expressing her conservative reaction to the written opinion of our State Attorney General, Betty D. Montgomery.
As you know, MetroHealth Medical Center is the major trauma center in northeast Ohio and holds as a core value the provision of service to any resident of Cuyahoga County regardless of ability to pay. Without our twelve Anesthesiologist Assistants, we are struggling to fulfill our mission to provide timely, high quality operating room services to our patients. We have pulled all our residents from their required rotations and put them to service in the operating rooms. Our Pain Service is suffering from lack of coverage. We are canceling our vacations. Our Anesthesiologists are in many instances now forced to abandon the preferred Anesthesia Care Team model and do complex cases unaided. Fortunately, no patient has been harmed, yet.
All 12 of the Anesthesiologist Assistants whose valuable services we suddenly lost are fully trained, highly competent individuals, certified by the National Commission for Certification of Anesthesiologist Assistants. Yet, they apparently must remain out of the hospital until S.B. 278 is signed into law! We need our Anesthesiologist Assistants back on their jobs!
Respectfully, Perioperative Staff, MetroHealth Medical Center