Peter & Donna Pinckney: Clinic once run by board of doctors, now doctors are pawns

To The Daily Sun,

It is such a personal loss to discover that Dr. Daniel Kallmerten is no longer to be a physician for Concord Hospital, especially the clinic. He has been our primary care physician since Dr. Lawrence Rush retired and he has been particularly effective in dealing with my serious medical conditions in the last year. Because of his professional input with Boston hospitals, I am starting to see steps in the direction toward normal living.

Last week we saw Dr. Kallmerten for an appointment for updates on my condition. Three days later we were informed by Concord Hospital by letter that he no longer would be our physician, but by November new providers would be available. In the interim, it is more than rumor that several other doctors were no longer part of the Concord Hospital team. Can we conclude that it was a budgetary move to “fire” exemplary physicians and replace them with new faces? Might we also conclude that the clinic, once a valuable medical stronghold of the community, will no longer exist in the near future? Once the clinic was run by the doctors as a board; now the doctors are simply pawns in the larger money game. That puts patient care nearly out of the picture. At this point in time, nobody locally is taking on new patients, and I just cannot go without a PCP at this time. Dr. Kallmerten, with his professional and personal perception, well understood such conditions. We wish him well at his new endeavors.

Peter & Donna Pinckney

Laconia