The Sitka Assembly is calling for the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, or SEARHC, to reconsider a decision it made last fall to close its home health department. The assembly unanimously approved a resolution at its meeting on April 9.

SEARHC replaced its home health department with a “home-based care” model last September. Since then, some Sitkans have protested the change. In testimony at town halls, ads and letters to the editor in the newspaper, and to SEARHC’s Community Health Council, they’ve raised concerns about the level of care patients will receive, and potential cost of the new program, which is no longer Medicare-certified.

Throughout the process, SEARHC has maintained that the level of service will remain the same for patients, and that it has no plans to reestablish the home health department. 

At a meeting in January, assembly member Kevin Mosher said he’d spoken to SEARHC officials and felt confident in the new home health program. But at the April 9 assembly meeting, Mosher said he’d given the issue some more thought, and decided to co-sponsor a resolution calling for SEARHC to address the community’s concerns with assembly member Tim Pike. 

“I have since learned a lot, and have considered all versions of this to the best of my ability as a non-medical care professional,” Mosher said. “This is a soft memo and a soft ordinance. We’re respectfully requesting that SEARHC consider reaching out to the public for genuine involvement to find out what the public really feels and thinks about this.” 

In addition to public outreach, the resolution also asks that SEARHC consider reinstating the previous home health program.  

10 community members shared testimony on the home health change, including retired physician Connie Kreiss, who said that SEARHC’s current services are not equivalent to what it provided before last fall. And she said SEARHC had not made enough of an effort to engage with the community on the issue- noting a recent Community Health Council meeting that limited public comments on the issue. 

“The once-a-year public input mandated by the SEARHC Sitka Community Health Council was…it’s hard to describe it, it was not respectful. It was not adequate,” Kreiss said. “It’s my hope that the resolution may encourage SEARHC administrators to rethink their relationship with citizens to truly engage with the Sitka community.”

Stephanie Weddel is the local president of the Alaska Native Sisterhood. She said there are currently members of ANS and the Alaska Native Brotherhood who traveled out of town for medical treatment, and haven’t been able to return home due to the lack of services. 

“My husband and I experienced this with a couple that we were friends with just last month who ended up being in Anchorage for more than a month for health care because they could not come home due to the care that was needed,” Weddel said. “And it was simple care that they could have gotten from home health care, but it wasn’t available here.”

Peter Karras Jr. is the president of the local ANB chapter, and he echoed Weddell’s concerns. 

“This isn’t something that’s just gonna go away,” Karras said. “I’m here in favor of ‘a squeaky wheel gets oiled.’ So I think if we say things loud enough, often enough, SEARHC will hear.”

“If it was around, I’d probably be using it for my mother right now,” said assembly member Thor Christianson. “She’s 89 years old and got pretty good dementia, and she could use it, [it’s] not there, and I think that this is something that we very much need here. And I hope our little resolution makes a difference.”

And assembly member JJ Carlson felt that the resolution said a lot in very few words. 

“We respectfully request that SEARHC considers reestablishing a Medicare-certified home healthcare department by convening and engaging the public. We’ve recognized that SEARHC is independent, but desire that SEARHC seeks out genuine public engagement,” Carlson read aloud from the resolution. “There’s a lot in those two sentences there, and I’m fully behind asking them to do exactly that.”

The assembly unanimously passed the resolution. KCAW reached out to SEARHC for comment on the resolution, but did not receive a response by press time.