Last week began with positive news: Alliance Community Hospital officially became an affiliate of Aultman Health Foundation.
It ended with sobering news: Affinity Medical Center in Massillon soon will shut its doors, reducing its patient count starting this week and ceasing operations altogether just before midnight Feb. 4. The move will leave Stark County's second largest city without its own hospital for the first time since 1910.
The ramifications — on each end of this spectrum — cannot be overstated.
In Alliance, the hospital will keep its name and will continue to operate, even adding services based on the community's needs, hospital administrators said as the transition took effect Jan. 1. Management and staffing are expected to remain intact.
In Massillon, on the other hand, hundreds of workers will be affected. Affinity did not provide a current employment figure Friday; a report from August 2016 put the number at about 800. That's hundreds of well-paid physicians and nurses, along with support staff earning living wages who will stop receiving paychecks March 6.
Mayor Kathy Catazaro-Perry, a nurse herself, and her administration are faced with assessing the impact on city finances after only recently guiding the city out of fiscal emergency.
"It is a critical need in our city," she said Friday. "It's vital that we turn this around. We are going to find out what our options are and find a direction for us to move in."
School districts, parks and recreation facilities, libraries and other entities that rely on taxes directly or indirectly also will be affected. Closing a hospital, typically among any community's largest employers, means more financially than less tax support; it alters property values and the overall quality of life in other negative ways.
Declining revenue — Affinity said it has lost money over the past six years — and "a highly competitive market" led to the "immensely difficult decision" to close, Affinity Chief Executive Officer John Walsh said in a news release. "We worked diligently to identify a regional partner to acquire the facility but were unsuccessful."
On the other side of the county, Aultman and Alliance Community have defined success in this kind of joint venture. They established their partnership 20 years ago to help build a new hospital there. Since then, they have worked together as members of the Independent Hospital Network and teamed to establish a heart center and cancer center in Alliance, according to information from the hospitals.
Aultman CEO and President Edward J. Roth III called it important for Alliance Community to remain a not-for-profit, community hospital that brings a "local voice" — not only to eastern Stark County, but also to portions of western Columbiana and Mahoning counties and southern Portage County.
Similarly, Affinity is more than "Massillon's hospital." It serves patients across western Stark and eastern Wayne counties and has filled a void for many patients since Doctors Hospital shut its doors in Perry Township nearly a decade ago.
On Friday, Massillon Fire Chief Tom Burgasser said his department transports approximately 4,000 people to area medical facilities each year, about 3,000 of them to Affinity. Where will they go? How long will it take to get there?
Many health providers use some variation of the slogan "When Every Second Counts." Without a hospital in western Stark County, seconds might become minutes for many in need of emergency, life-saving care.
We never would hesitate to place our lives in the hands of the amazing doctors and nurses at Aultman Hospital and Mercy Medical Center. The question is whether the victim of a car accident or a gunshot wound or the person suffering a heart attack can get to those skilled caregivers in time.
For the sake of residents in Massillon and all across western Stark County, we hope to see another health care provider fill this looming, critical void.