Sutterwriters
Anita Creamer: Sutter group in need of its own healing
By Anita Creamer - Bee Columnist
Published 12:00 am PDT Wednesday, July 18, 2007
With its free weekly writing groups for the ill and suffering, Sutter Medical Center's groundbreaking Literature, Arts and Medicine Program has been a beacon of healing for more than 600 people in the past five years.
Now LAMP's supporters are launching an earnest letter- writing campaign to save it from budget cuts.
Good luck with that, people.
They thought the situation was pretty clear: A health care institution compassionate enough to sponsor a writing program was surely interested in more than the bottom line.
Bless their hearts, they also thought the existence of LAMP and its Sutterwriters program indicated that Sutter grasped that medicine at its best treats the whole human being, not just ailments and broken body parts.
Maybe they misunderstood. Or maybe compassion and creativity don't stand a chance when money's an issue.
"Sutter presents itself as a service to the community, so it was really neat that Sutter supported LAMP," says Melisa McCampbell, whose doctor referred her to the program when she became ill taking care of her elderly parents.
"It really felt like you were part of something."
LAMP was founded in 2002 by Lawrence Spann, a physician assistant with a doctorate in literature and an interest in healing through creative writing.
He received his walking papers three weeks ago, when he learned he's one of 41 Sutter employees whose jobs are being eliminated. Since there's not much more to LAMP and Sutterwriters than Spann's vision, his layoff means the program's demise, as well.
"I'll be paid through the end of August, but I'm closing the groups down now," says Spann. "It's difficult to go through these circumstances.
"I have to take the physician's assistant national board exams in August. When you lose your income and health insurance, you have to change gears."
And so supporters are busily shooting off e-mails to Sutter administrators, trying to convince people focused on their spreadsheets that LAMP has a value that goes beyond dollars and cents.
Again, good luck with that.
"We're working on an affordability agenda," says Sutter assistant administrator Margaret Mette. "To afford our new hospital, we've been looking at reducing our expenses."
You see the problem. To serve more patients in the future, a few sacrifices need to be made now. Sutter Medical Center has already had a hiring freeze. According to a recent memo, the current staff reduction amounts to less than 1 percent of employees -- in all fairness, a tiny number.
"I think they should've said 'employees with no billable patient contact,' " says Elizabeth Brick, a Methodist minister who's attended Sutterwriters groups. "Lawrence can't bill insurance companies for the people who come to the program."
And how, after all, do you measure a dying patient's level of acceptance or quantify the healing of the soul?
Squishy concepts don't tend to do well in the business world, and emotional transformation doesn't bring in the bucks.
Mette points out that Sutterwriters has spawned more than a half-dozen local spinoff groups.
"We think we can continue the program in a different venue," she says. "But Sutter personnel won't be leading the group."
Really, though, outsourcing doesn't amount to a program at all -- certainly not one that's nationally recognized and locally sponsored.
Besides, says McCampbell: "It takes a very skilled individual to pull these groups off. There are other writing groups, but these things can become uncomfortable in the wrong hands."
Spann prefers to talk about the opportunity that Sutter provided him to create LAMP and how changed he is by the patients he's met there.
So let's leave the final word to Brick, the pastor: "This program was great PR for the hospital. Sutter had the potential to be different."
And now that opportunity's gone.