Eye Doctors Sever Ties With Carilion Clinic
By Ray Reed, The Roanoke Times, Va.
May 3–A group of eye doctors who set up their own surgical clinic about seven years ago cut their last ties with Carilion Clinic on Wednesday.
Doctors from Vistar Eye Center will no longer handle trauma calls from the hospitals’ emergency rooms, Dr. Frank Cotter said.
Eric Earnhart, spokesman for Carilion, said the hospital system has other ophthalmologists it can rely on for trauma calls, and a schedule for emergency service by them was being worked out.
Cotter said the split finally occurred because the 16 doctors at Vistar Eye Center couldn’t reach agreement with Carilion about the hospital system’s becoming a clinic that prefers to employ its doctors.
Under the previous arrangement, Vistar doctors were in private practice but responded to hospital calls in order to have privileges to use hospital facilities when needed.
Vistar, with two operating rooms of its own, can handle a separation from Carilion Clinic.
"They’re excellent doctors, and we wish them well," Earnhart said.
Both Earnhart and Cotter said talks between the entities had been going on for more than a year. Cotter said those talks essentially ended last fall after Carilion administrators stopped returning his calls.
Eye trauma is not a major part of hospital business, Earnhart said, estimating that an ophthalmologist is called into the emergency room about once a week.
Cotter said the number of consultations is much higher than that. When it was his turn to be on call, hospital doctors contacted him about once a day, Cotter said.
"Eye emergencies need to be acutely managed," Cotter said, and while emergency surgeries normally don’t occur every day, serious problems do come frequently.
Other doctors contact ophthalmologists almost every day about treatment of patients whose eyes have embedded foreign bodies, acid burns and vein and artery blockages, Cotter said.
"Eye emergencies are very frequent," he said.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Roanoke Times, Va.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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