Since 1908, Regional Hospital of Scranton, including Moses Taylor, remains a NEPA health care ecosystem legacy pillar, delivering lifesaving services to generations of families to promote our health and well-being.

Regional’s sustainability is vital for acute care access when patients are most vulnerable. Its obstetrical center of excellence ensures the safe arrival of the vast majority of babies born in our community. The Wright Center is eager to collaborate with new ownership to ensure seamless, forward momentum of community-responsive, high-quality health services and community-based physician and interprofessional health care workforce development. All stakeholders should meaningfully engage to ensure new ownership seeks and values community input, while maintaining and improving access to health care services, employment, and workforce development opportunities.

Recently announced potential plans to preserve Regional brings hopeful but cautious optimism to a broad coalition of community members, legacy partners, advocacy organizations, and the health care union. Our collective commitment to collaboratively ensure preserving access to health care services, protecting family-sustaining jobs, upholding crucial hospital partnerships, and empowering our community’s priorities is unwavering.

For nearly 50 years, The Wright Center has been deeply mission-intertwined with Regional to improve the health and welfare of our communities through responsive, whole-person health services for all and the sustainable renewal of an inspired, competent workforce that is privileged to serve. Community benefit impact, health outcomes, and economic vitality generated by our enduring partnership are undeniable.

Together, we have cared for countless patients and families; trained over 1,000 physicians, possibly including your doctor amongst many serving NEPA today; and educated innumerable health care students from a dozen academic institutions to understand and serve our unique needs. In 2024, almost half of The Wright Center’s total economic impact of $198,978,143, supporting 1,199 local jobs, was generated by The Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education, a cherished community asset dependent on its foundational Regional partnership for its existence.

My personal connection to Regional runs deep. So much of who I am professionally was determined by my recruitment home 25 years ago as a Mercy physician to join Dr. Tucker Clauss, who delivered me in 1968 at the then Mercy Hospital. The valuable mentorship and learning I received serving patients, families, and communities inside Regional’s walls can never be overstated. My deeply personal, hard-won journey culminated in a historic election as the first female and, as fate would have it, final president of Mercy’s medical staff, a landmark achievement quickly and tragically overshadowed by heartbreak when our cherished hospital transitioned to for-profit ownership.

Its turbulent, uncertain future continues today. Faithfully, I continue caring for multigenerational families who depend on Regional for life-saving services. Like many of you, losing Regional would feel like losing family.

Stabilizing NEPA’s acute hospital services is undeniably urgent, particularly given our aging population and prevalence of chronic disease. Allowing Regional to close would trigger a devastating, modern-day “Tragedy of the Commons,” immediately crippling access to acute hospital services. The devastating human and economic aftershocks on our community would be long-lasting. Future generations would pay the price for decades.

Regional delivers 380,000 encounters annually, including 36,000 emergency visits. Closure would instantaneously create a critical shortage of nearly 30,000 acute hospital “bed days” and longer wait times for everyone in our region’s already overflowing and overburdened ERs.

Impact on maternal and newborn care would be equally catastrophic. Over 1,700 expectant mothers and 70% of babies born in Lackawanna County rely on Regional’s services annually. Other area hospitals simply lack capacity to accommodate this volume or the ability to replace Lackawanna County’s only Level III neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The next closest NICU is 45 minutes away – an eternity for newborns struggling to breathe.

Beyond patient care, Regional’s major employer contributions are vital to our local economy, providing more than 1,000 family-sustaining, union-supported jobs, injecting $148 million in wages and benefits.

Failure to secure Regional’s viable future is simply not an option. The Wright Center for Graduate Medical Education’s existence depends on a community solution. All stakeholders, including elected officials, leadership of health systems, educational institutions, labor, and business, and, most importantly, each of us whose lives are on the line, must engage meaningfully to ensure a welcoming transition to new ownership.

Together, we need to communicate our expectations to ensure new ownership will truly seek and value meaningful community input to honor our legacies and collective priorities, while steadfastly maintaining and improving access to essential health care services, employment opportunities, and workforce development.