When the Measure L ballot lands in your mailbox today asking for
a $31 million bond to expand Hazel Hawkins Hospital, don’t hesitate
to vote yes.
When the Measure L ballot lands in your mailbox today asking for a $31 million bond to expand Hazel Hawkins Hospital, don’t hesitate to vote yes.
Hazel Hawkins, currently operating in a cramped 53,000 square-foot facility, desperately needs to grow so it can offer the kind of services our community deserves. The hospital is doing the best it can to operate out of a facility built in the 1960s to serve a population of 12,000, but we now number 55,000 in San Benito County, and Hazel Hawkins is bursting at the seams.
On the weekends it is not uncommon for patients to line the hallways waiting for one of the three beds in the emergency room – there were more than 14,000 visits to the ER last year. The labor and delivery unit is small, outdated and offers very little privacy to mothers giving birth when it’s full. And it’s not uncommon to hear people say that they have to travel to Saint Louise Hospital in Gilroy, or even San Jose, to get specialized health care. Those conditions should be unacceptable to all of us, and we all should reach into our pockets to do something about it.
Hazel Hawkins has a staff dedicated to providing quality service, but the building they work out of is woefully inadequate. This bond measure will double the size of the hospital and will bring modern technology to improve Hazel Hawkins’ ability to diagnose and treat patients here in San Benito County.
It will pay for a new ER that can handle 30,000 visits in a year, it will add rooms for labor and delivery and post partum care, it will upgrade the hospital’s laboratory and it will provide new diagnostic equipment to detect cancer and heart problems. The bill for such a dramatic increase in health care is relatively small: $14.95 annually per $100,000 of assessed home value.
The bottom line is San Benito County has grown significantly since the Hazel Hawkins was built, and this bond will go a long way in ensuring our medical facilities catch up with the demand. This is truly an investment that will pay off for all of us. So, please, support the effort to deliver better health care to San Benito County.
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