‘It’s awful’: Doctor’s office closing sends shivers through small Pennsylvania town
By Kris B. Mamula / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
EMLENTON, Pa. — A Pittsburgh-based health system shuttered a physician’s office in this speck of an Allegheny River town in southeast Venango County, leaving the borough without a doctor for the first time in decades and elderly residents trying to figure out how to get to medical appointments.
UPMC’s recent closure of the Emlenton Area Family Practice on Main Street left the borough’s 650 residents without a doctor, which is being felt most acutely by elderly and disabled residents of a subsidized housing complex across the street. Clinic patient Betty Bishop, who lives in the complex, said she now has to figure out how to get a ride to her UPMC doctor’s office in Shippenville, Clarion County, about 20 miles away.
“I have a friend that drives, but she’s 80 something and has bad hips,” said Ms. Bishop, a retired carbide shop worker who is 95 years old. “I’m kind of stuck. It’s awful.”
UPMC spokeswoman Susan Manko said the “very small” Emlenton primary care office was consolidated with a larger office in Shippenville, where patients will have expanded access to medical care.
Emlenton’s problems in accessing medical care have become increasingly common in rural Pennsylvania as big health systems cut health care services to reduce costs and improve efficiency while assuring that physicians keep up their skills. In rural Elk County, for example, the county commissioners on Thursday created an independent hospital authority to find ways of restoring hospital maternity care that Clearfield County-based Penn Highlands Healthcare had eliminated at its St. Marys hospital in May.
Elk County business leaders say comprehensive health care services are key to the economic survival of small towns, where full-service hospitals are needed to attract new workers and businesses. The Elk County HealthCare Coalition has been lobbying for a restoration of health care services.
In Venango County, elected officials confront the same problem.
“It’s just a struggle to get doctors to rural areas,” Venango County Commissioner Albert “Chip” Abramovic said. “If we don’t have the hospitals — guess what — we lose population.”
Driving farther for medical care will affect Cathy and Paul Kentzel, Pittsburgh transplants who ran the Barnard House, a bed and breakfast in town, for 12 years. They’re winding down the business and retiring, but plan to continue living in the Allegheny River valley.
“We now have to seek another facility, probably UPMC because they dominate the area,” said Mrs. Kentzel, 60 years old. “It is difficult.”
A more immediate effect of the UPMC office closing is the shuttering of a fitness center in the basement of the clinic, said Barbara Warden, president of the Emlenton Area Medical Corp., a nonprofit created in the 1980s to fund the medical office. Borough residents could use the fitness center for a nominal fee.
Emlenton Area Medical is appealing for help to other health systems and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office.
“We have this beautiful medical facility, very well maintained,” said Ms. Warden, 78, an Emlenton resident and retired grade school teacher. “If we don’t have a medical provider, we will not be able to keep the fitness center open either. We’re just sort of up a creek without a paddle.”
“It’s a big deal for a small town,” she said.
The big deal in tiny Emlenton began in 1974 with the death of Dr. Arthur W. Phillips.
Dr. Phillips, an Emlenton native and philanthropist, created the Dr. and Mrs. Arthur W. Phillips Charitable Trust, which began buying properties on Main Street in 1979 to build what would become the Emlenton Area Medical Center. The Emlenton Area Medical Corp. received quarterly stipends from the trust to maintain the building, which was constructed in 1980 and is owned by the borough.
The Phillips’ trust was enriched by Dr. Phillips’ shrewd stock market investments, a skill he picked up from his father and others during the oil and gas boom in the past century in northwest Pennsylvania, according to an historic marker that named him physician and humanitarian. Edwin Drake struck oil 30 miles north of Emlenton near Titusville in 1859, igniting an energy boom in Western Pennsylvania that created the giant Quaker State Oil Refining Co. in Emlenton in the early 1930s.
At one time, the train depot in town was served by 11 daily passenger trains.
Those days are long past as population slipped and the town struggles to reinvent itself as an outdoor recreational destination. Neffys Cigars, a coffee shop and an ice cream parlor — with a sign in the window saying it’s closed for the season — are among the signs of the community’s budding rebirth on Main Street.
“The building is really in pristine shape,” Ms. Warden said about the closed clinic. “Our goal is to attract someone to come into this area.”