Thank you for Nick Reid’s excellent account of the recent Concord planning board hearing (Monitor front page, July 24) about Concord Orthopaedics’s plan to obliterate through rezoning the lovely and historic residential neighborhood nestled between St. Paul’s School and Concord Hospital so that wealthy specialty physicians can build a day surgery center at what is now a residence at 297 Pleasant Street. He describes an epic battle.
But the devil is also quite literally in the details.
Among the revelations from the hearing: the so-called “day surgery center” will actually house some patients overnight, so the facility is really a small hospital with all the 24/7 bustle such an institution imposes. We also learned that the medical advantages of siting the facility near the existing hospital are nil unless you confuse physician convenience with patient welfare. Asked how many times complications have required transferring patients from the orthopedists’ current facility to Concord Hospital, the lawyer for the docs offered up the lame excuse that medical privacy rules precluded him from saying. In reality, privacy covers individual patient records, not statistics.
Finally, there was the image of the proposed building itself – intended to make it appear, from the air, that the big new facility will be just a grassy field because it will have a “green roof.” This recourse to visual propaganda fatally undermines the credibility of Concord Orthopaedics.
Please continue to follow this story relentlessly. The soul of the city is at stake.
D. MAURICE KREIS
Concord