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Senior services threatened
The seniors living at Westwood House are scared. They are scared about going hungry, and they are scared about their friends dying if they do not get to a hospital in time.
These things will happen, they say, if
Pascack
Valley
Hospital closes.
“It’s a damn shame,” said Grace Burke, one of the 20-odd seniors gathered in the community room of the
Riley
Center , located within Westwood House. “We need a hospital.”
Children and seniors are the two most vulnerable segments of the population, and the people most likely to be impacted by the November closing of Pascack Valley Hospital (PVH). With seniors, though, there are no parents looking after them: many are housebound, many on fixed incomes, and many dependent on the nearby hospital.
“What do you do if the van is not here, what do you do if there are no meals?” asked senior Mary Novello.
Those are the questions seniors across the Pascack and
Northern
Valleys have been asking since the hospital announced its bankruptcy in September. So far, there are few answers.
Westwood House is an affordable housing complex funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The
Riley
Center , a nonprofit organization, provides low cost meals and activities for minimal fees. Besides the meals, the
Riley
Center will lose the programs provided by the
Community
Outreach
Center , located in the
Riley
Center : health education programs, exercise sessions, free blood pressure screenings, and van transportation to medical appointments. The on-call nurse and the podiatrist will stop coming, the social worker sessions will be discontinued.
Marianne Wall, director of the
Riley
Center , says that many seniors have announced that they will stop going to physical therapy if it means they must travel the extra distance to
Valley
Hospital in Ridgewood or
Hackensack
University
Medical
Center . It’s too much of a hassle for them and they cannot afford cab fares.
“We’re not very affluent. There’s not much money going around,” said Westwood House’s Grace Marino.
Then there is the obvious: the proximity. Minutes count in an emergency. An extra quarter hour in an ambulance can mean life or death.
“If I’m a senior having a heart attack, time is of the essence,” said Westwood Mayor Thomas Wanner.
According to Wanner, current runs to the PVH emergency room take roughly an hour; going to Ridgewood or
Hackensack can tack on 15 to 30 more minutes. With only one ambulance per town in the
Pascack
Valley , Wanner said, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
“It’s not going to be like, ‘Oh gee whiz, we have other hospitals willing to pick up the slack,’” he said. “I can’t see how the state can suggest that we have too many hospitals in the area.”
The impact on seniors goes well beyond the 190 residents of Westwood House. In total, 1,300 seniors use the services provided by PVH monthly. The hospital kitchen also provides meals for Meals on Wheels and the
McGuire
Senior
Center in Northvale, churning out 200 meals daily for seniors– meals that often serve as the seniors’ main meal of the day.
One small comfort seniors can take is that Meals on Wheels, the food program for housebound seniors, will continue.
“Meals on Wheels is going to be fine,” said Jeanne Martin, who runs the program out of the PVH kitchen. She is in talks to find the right caterer. Her concerns now reside with the bigger picture. Meals on Wheels operates separately from the Riley and McGuire centers, both of which have yet to find where their next meals are coming from.
Unlike other areas in
Bergen
County that have had senior services for years, the Pascack and
Northern
Valleys lack a greater senior service organization.
“Fifty years ago there weren’t a lot of older people. They were building their houses,” she said. Should the hospital indeed close, she suggested that a greater service organization could pick up the slack. Right now they are left hanging, a perilous state for seniors who “like to know how things are going to be.”
So of course the seniors are scared. The administration is, too.
“I’m going absolutely crazy right now about what to do about lunches,” said Wall at the
Riley
Center .
After Nov. 2, the hospital will stop providing meals to the center. Wall has been on the phone seeking new caterers, but has yet to receive any quotes, and has yet to ease the concerns of Westwood House denizens.
“They keep asking me, ‘Marianne, what are we going to do?’”
Wall’s repeated answer, she says, makes her feel like she’s in a Verizon commercial: “We’re working on it.”
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