Bohanan Hosts Review of Services



ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN — House Delegate John Bohanan, 47, of St. Mary’s, chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Resources, evaluated the social services, hospital situation and the ongoing combat against alcohol abuse in St. Mary’s County at three different meetings Wednesday.
The subcommittee meetings were also attended by vice chair Tawanna Gaines, and delegates Anthony O’Donnell, Steven DeBoy and Adelaide Eckardt.
The delegates heard St. Mary’s County is faced with a higher caseload of child support cases than many other jurisdictions.
The Social services department is presently handling 4341 cases, including 989 inter-state cases. “There are 1,085 cases per worker. It’s overwhelming,” said supervisor Kevin Corrigan. “There is a 67 percent collection rate,” he told the delegates.
“This mean one-third of the cases goes uncollected?” asked Bohanan. The delegates were informed since St. Mary’s was a rural jurisdiction child support collections were bottlenecked because of under the table payments.
Bohanan commended social services director Ella May Russell, who has more than three decades of service behind her, for perfecting the faith-based networks long before it became an official document.
Russell told the delegates her department is faced with a serious challenge in recruiting and retaining social workers because of the low pay. She complained none seems interested in addressing this key issue.
“If you are coming to St. Mary’s, you are not on your way anywhere else as there is water on all three sides,” Russell said, explaining people come to the county specifically in pursuit of a job.
She said her office has about nine openings presently. “Salary is one of the impediments,” said Russell. “It’s very difficult to recruit.” She said St. Mary’s has to compete with Washington DC, and Charles, Anne Arundel, Prince George counties to lure qualified candidates.
She said the work in the field of social services can not strictly be a 9 to 5 job and those working for it have to be live locally to build links with the local communities.
She said the education department pays $10,000 more and the office of aging $8,000 as compared to a candidate with the same level of qualification. She said current legislation does not allow hiring contractual workers in social services, though many retirees want to join the department.
Russell described Maryland’s new computerized system Chessie a helpful tool in identifying issues confronting the people before they get lost in the bureaucratic red-tape.
Bohanan pointed out the social services business base increases in the case of economic downturn. “At present we have a jobless rate is three percent but how do we prepare for a difficulty when it dips to five or seven percent,” he said.
Led by Bohanan, the delegates then went to St. Mary’s Hospital to get an update on the situation there.
“The physicians have to run like hamsters,” the hospital’s president and chief executive officer Christine Wray said in her briefing to the delegates. Local oil magnate Sonny Burch also attended the briefing.
The presentation made to Bohanan-led team bared the acute shortage of physicians faced at the nearly 100-year-old hospital. As of 2005, in family practice the need was of 23.40 while the number of doctors stood at 8, in obstetrics and gynecology the need was 12.54 doctors but they numbered six, in internal medicine the need was 17.13 but the supply was eleven and in pediatrics the need was 11.23 but the supply stood at eight.
Wray said in the five-year period inpatient admissions at the hospital jumped from 5,800 to 7,527 in 2005. The projected inpatient admission for 2006 is 8,943 or a jump of nearly 19 percent, she said.
The emergency room (ER) visits increased from 22,871 in 2000 to 37,512 in 2005, representing a growth of 64 percent Wray said. She said in 2006 the number is expected to jump to 40,316.
At Walden Sierra, executive director Kathleen O’Brien briefed the delegates that as many there St. Mary’s County residents have to wait for 14 days, Charles County seven days and Calvert County four days for admissions in the detoxification program.
Walden Sierra has some of the best counselors anywhere in the country, including Barbara Zeigler.
Alcohol abuse in St. Mary’s is twice as much than the state average. O’Brian told ST. MARY’S TODAY an additional 10 beds can bring the waiting list to one or two days.
O’Brien was happy over the appointment of Alcohol Abuse Director at St. Mary’s Health Department and said it would help with the oversight of alcohol program in the county.
Dr William Icenhower said Dr. Susan Bergman would be the new director.
Bohanan later told ST. MARY’S TODAY the issues that were covered by the Appropriations Subcommittee touch people directly but are often put on the backburner. “The issues pertained to the wellbeing of the most vulnerable segments of the population,” he said.
Bohanan said, “On the alcohol side, we can’t forget the problem is critical to workforce productivity.”
He said Senator Roy Dyson could not attend Wednesday’s because of a funeral and Delegate John Wood was held up in meetings in Annapolis.
Two St. Mary’s commissioners who are most likely to be re-elected, Tom Mattingly (D. Leonardtown) and Dan Raley (D. Great Mills), attended the meeting at Walden Sierra. Commissioner President Tommy McKay (R. Hollywood) also attended the end of the meeting.