Talk:Salem Hospital (Oregon)

Assessment
There is no talk here about the two different buildings or what is on which campus. When the hospitals merged together, it stopped the duplication of services and really helped improve the overall care being provided to the Salem community. Reassessed START class. C. Williams (talk) 00:04, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Possibly stupid question
Is this really the only hospital in Salem? You'd think a city of 150,000 people would have more than one hospital. Fvasconcellos (t·c) 19:36, 2 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, it really is the only hospital (not counting the Oregon State Hospital which is only for psyc). Next closest is probably the one in Dallas, then Stayton or Silverton, but all not too far. Aboutmovies (talk) 09:06, 3 August 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks for the information :) Fvasconcellos (t·c) 13:44, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

There used to be more than one. I haven't quite sorted out all the merger history. Salem General was/is in the vicinity of Oregon State Hospital. The building now serves as the rehab unit of Salem Hospital. Here's a bit of the history: http://www.salemhistory.net/places/salem_hospital.htm Katr67 (talk) 07:44, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Emergency room claim is not verified
The claim that Salem Hospital service has the "busiest ER department' in Oregon as far as I can tell is a self reported fact and apparently includes ALL the Emergency Room visits for both hospitals (Salem/Dallas) and their Urgent care facility. I would appreciate that the citation request be addressed rather than simply removed from the article.Awotter (talk) 21:18, 6 August 2008 (UTC)


 * (moved from talk page)

Could you tell me where there is any sort of policy, rule, guideline requiring "accessible" sources? Good luck finding it. Please stop asking for online sources, they are not required in any way what so ever. In fact, if you look at WP:RS, the best sources are those that were at least originally print sources (academically reviewed journals and such). Remember that WP:V is that it is verifiable, not that you can verify it. The tag re-added here is supported by the only thing close to an independent source you will find. Any data for any hospital is never going to be completely independent, as there is no independent body with employees at every hospital keeping track of statistics. All the hospital stats are complied from surveys completed by the hospitals. Now as to the urgent care clinic, I don't recall the source given including those, do you have a source saying so? Lastly, since apparently you don't believe that the hospital could possibly have the busiest ER, take a second to analyze the situation. It is the only hospital in Salem, the third largest city in the state in the second largest metro area. It is by far the largest hospital in its metro area (Polk and Marion co.). Whereas Eugene (number 2 in city pop, 3 in metro) has two good sized hospitals right next to the city. Cities #4-6 are in the PDX metro area, where you have very large hospitals that handle lots of ER visits in Leg. Good Sam, St. Vincent's, Emanuel, OHSU, Providence, and even Tuality and Meridian Park and the hospitals in Milwauke, Gresham, Oregon City, the Kaiser's Sunnyside, and I'm sure I'm missing a hospital or two. St. Vincent's is really close, with about a thousand less ER visits per year out of I think it was 70,000, but Salem's is still busier. Aboutmovies (talk) 21:01, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The policy on stating facts and figures on Wikipedia has always been that material needs to be able to be independently verified, if you are quoting figures from other than online sources then I would appreciate that you cite them in full, including page numbers, so they can be checked, otherwise the information will be challenged and removed, especially if that information comes from the hospital with no way to verify it.Awotter (talk) 18:23, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I added to the article the numbers from the referenced 2007 spreadsheet to the inline reference note, the difference between Salem's ER and Portland's Providence St Vincent is about 900 patients or little more than 2 more visits per day on average so I have updated the article accordingly. SH apparently reports ER and UC visits when making their claim: SH Newsrelease archives "State's busiest ER offers heat-safety tips: July 9, 2007 'Salem Hospital will see more than 100,000 patients at its ER and Urgent Care Center this year, making it the busiest in the state'." It could be that this is where the S-J reporters are probably getting their figures. Awotter (talk) 20:19, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
 * First, "The policy on stating facts and figures on Wikipedia has always been that material needs to be able to be independently verified..." is not the message you were communicating in your edit summaries here and here on this article. You wanted to be able to check them, and you could if you searched the archives of the Statesman Journal (notice it is no longer the Statesman-Journal) via whatever source you have available to you. Thus the information that it is the busiest was verifiable, and from independent sources, in fact two since you challenged it the first time. Also note, it is the source that needs to be independent, not the information itself. Most information out there is self reported, including the number of students at schools, the revenue/profit figures for companies, to the number of people who visit a park or a hospital.
 * Second, I would suggest you not remove items that do not meet your demands, as that is beyond Wikipedia policy. I will, per WP:V provide a page number for a book, as I normally do. But newspaper articles do not require a page number. Along those lines, none of the sources for the information you challenged were the hospital. One was the state, the second a newspaper. I would suppose the Wikipedia community would agree that those qualify as reliable sources. BTW, independent of the subject has to do with notability guidelines or an essay which holds little value as it is simply the opinion of a minimum of one editor and has not been approved by the community and which does not require the information in the source be independent of the subject, just that the source is independent of the subject (i.e. no Intel company newsletter as a source on Intel).
 * Third, regarding your earlier claims about the Dallas hospital numbers being combined, were you accusing me of combining Salem Hospital with West Valley Hospital? Otherwise it is clear by the source that the two are listed separately. Additionally, by the source you provided and the state reported numbers, it is obvious that for the state reported numbers of around 70,000 ER visits does not include urgent care visits (i.e. 70,000 is less than more than 100,000), thus it (per the SJ article and state source) is the busiest ER in Oregon. Aboutmovies (talk) 07:57, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I spent at least 2 hours attempting to find any of the information or articles you referenced, since the S-J has changed their website NONE of them were available on Google or on the PAID S-J archive pages and once again I really don't give a crap about debating policies and guidelines when all I am doing is improving an article and apparently wasting my time doing so.Awotter (talk) 18:59, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Two hours? I just spent 2 minutes total finding the SJ's paid archives, and then searched using the title of the article that was cited as saying the hospital was the busiest.The search result may show up here. The article is right there, though I used a different service to find it. You have also wasted my time as I had to go back and correct your improvement to the newspaper's name, and the sources still say it is the busiest. Not to assume bad faith, but it comes across as either you have something against the hospital or you are trying to make a point by demanding external links to sources. Plus you made wrote in your edit summary "Please provide accesible references from outside sources that do not include the Urgent care clinic and dallas Hospital." when the numbers clearly did not include the Dallas facility and there is no indication on that page that urgent care visits are included. You asked for a more recent source for the info and were given one, and even though I didn't need to give you one that you could access and verify the info, I did. Yet you still went back and re-added the tag before removing it again and changing the wording to be more ambiguous. I'm just not seeing how you are attempting to improve the article since everything you asked for was given, and you haven't expanded the article. Aboutmovies (talk) 07:59, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Update, in just about 2 minutes total time I checked all the article titles listed in the refs section against the SJ's archive linked above and every single one of them came up just fine, with the "About Salem Hospital" the only one that came up with more than one article. If you don't use the quote marks (e.g. "search term") when searching then I would suggest you do as it works quite well. Aboutmovies (talk) 08:06, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Requesting updates
Hi. First, full disclosure: I work for Salem Health/Hospital in communications and have no desire to violate any conflict of interest guidelines that help make Wikipedia a good source of information. That said, the entries in this article are not up to date. I have sourced information that could help update this page that I could share with someone for consideration if anyone is interested. Oregonishome (talk) 18:57, 19 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for speaking up. I added a number of useful links to your talk page where you can review the conflict of interest policy and related information.
 * Go ahead and show, explain, or describe the changes you feel should be made here (on this talk page), and interested editors will apply them or explain why they are not doing so. Reliable sourcing is likely to be an issue because you have direct knowledge, but we often cannot include that in the article because of our key policy of verifiability.
 * The quality of any work of art is proportional to the quantity of effort which is not used in the end product! Don't be discouraged if 100% of your suggestions are not implemented.  Thank you for your contributions to improve the article!  —EncMstr (talk) 06:01, 20 April 2016 (UTC)