BY JIM HALL
Mary Washington Hospital will end its troubled weight-loss surgery program at the end of the month.
About 180 patients will be affected by the shut-down.
This includes 60 patients who have already had their surgeries and are participating in a follow-up program.
Another 120 patients were doing the preparations required for surgery and were scheduled to be operated on later this month or early next year. All of those surgeries have been canceled.
Mary Washington is referring its patients to the Bluepoint Surgical Group, a private surgical practice based in Woodbridge. The Bluepoint surgeons do weight-loss surgeries at Potomac Hospital in Woodbridge and Inova Fair Oaks Hospital in Fairfax.
"We hope that every patient who started the program at Mary Washington can continue with our program," said Dr. Denis Halmi, medical director for the Bluepoint group.
Patients were notified of the collapse of the Mary Washington program by phone beginning last week. Hospital employees learned about it this week.
"It's a lot of uncertainty," said one patient yesterday.
That patient, who asked not to be identified, said she had "lap-band" surgery and was awaiting her first adjustment to the band.
Lap-band patients have a silicone ring surgically inserted at the top of their stomachs. They must return to their surgeons every few months for adjustment of the band.
The patient said she doesn't know what she will do now.
"When I first heard, I was scared. I felt betrayed," she said.
This is the second time that Mary Washington has started and stopped a bariatric surgery program. The hospital also operated a program for about nine months in 2002-2003.
This time hospital officials spent about three years designing a comprehensive program that included pre-surgical testing and counseling and post-surgical record keeping and follow-up. Surgeries restarted last year.
Officials promised that the program would become a "center of excellence," as defined either by the American Society for Bariatric Surgery or the American College of Surgeons.
Some insurance plans, such as Medicare, require that patients have their surgeries done at a certified center.
One feature of these centers is that they host a certain minimum number of surgeries.
Mary Washington officials predicted that the two surgeons they employed, Dr. Victor Stelmack and Dr. Brian Mirza, would do enough surgeries that the program would eventually qualify for certification.
But the program suffered when other programs, including the Bluepoint program in Woodbridge, drew patients from the Fredericksburg area. When Mirza departed the hospital in June, he was not replaced.
"The program just hasn't got the necessary volume that we needed in order to get critical things like our certifications," said Walt Kiwall, executive vice president and chief operating officer for MediCorp Health System, parent company of Mary Washington, yesterday.
Kiwall said that the hospital will work with Stelmack to help him set up a general surgery practice. Stelmack could not be reached for comment yesterday.
The six people who work in the program will be offered jobs elsewhere in MediCorp, Kiwall said.
Jim Hall: 540/374-5433
Email: jhall@freelancestar.com
Candidates for weight-loss surgery have a body mass index of 40 or greater. This translates to about 100 pounds above ideal weight. A person who has a body mass index of 35 or greater can be a candidate if he or she has another medical condition such as diabetes. |