Will The Doctor See You Now?
Dr. Errol Crook, MSM Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs and Morehouse Healthcare Chief Medical Officer, spoke with Canopy Atlanta about the shortage of healthcare services for people in Hapeville, College Park, and East Point.
By Gray Chapman, Canopy Atlanta
Editor’s note: This story includes descriptions of a miscarriage.
Jennifer Jackson had been in excruciating pain for hours. Twelve weeks into pregnancy, Jackson was actively miscarrying. She’d experienced pregnancy loss several times before, though this level of pain and bleeding was so concerning that she worried she might be hemorrhaging. Finally, after midnight, Jackson asked her husband to call 911 so an ambulance could take her to the hospital.
The fire department arrived at her East Point home quickly, and when Jackson told them that she was bleeding through two pads an hour, they agreed that she needed medical care. But an ambulance, the first responders told her, might take at least two hours to arrive. Instead, they advised Jackson to lay towels down in her car and have her husband drive her to the emergency room at Piedmont Fayette Hospital, a 35-minute drive away. (Grady would be a shorter drive, but an hours-long wait.)
The first responders helped Jackson get in her car, then left. But, unable to stomach the idea of waiting for hours in an emergency room while bleeding and in pain, Jackson chose to stay home instead.
Fortunately, Jackson wasn’t hemorrhaging. But she still doesn’t have an explanation for why an ambulance couldn’t get to her any quicker that night. All she knows is that the confusion and fear around a life-threatening situation, with no one coming to help, left her feeling “terrified and flabbergasted.”
“Luckily I was not actually hemorrhaging and I think we were just really scared, but I don’t feel safe here.”
Jackson’s options that night in 2022 were limited. Had her medical emergency happened just two months earlier, she would have had another choice: get medical care at the emergency department minutes from her home.
Jackson was born in the hospital on Cleveland Avenue, then known as South Fulton Medical Center. In 2013, the facility merged with Atlanta Medical Center and became known as Atlanta Medical Center South, which Georgia-based healthcare company Wellstar acquired in 2016. But one month before Jackson’s ordeal, in May of 2022, Wellstar closed down the East Point emergency room, leaving Fulton County without an emergency room south of I-20.
Later that year, the healthcare system abruptly shut down Atlanta Medical Center’s main Old Fourth Ward campus on Boulevard, making metro Atlanta one of the few cities of its size, with a population of over five million people, with only one Level I trauma center at the time. (In May 2024, Wellstar Kennestone became the metro area’s second Level I trauma center.)
The two emergency rooms served areas with the largest population of Black and other minority patients out of all the hospitals Wellstar owned at the time, according to a federal civil rights complaint filed against Wellstar by state lawmakers and the NAACP last year.
Jackson admits she hadn’t had good experiences at the Cleveland Avenue hospital over the years. “But having nothing there is even worse.”
Losing an emergency room, let alone an entire hospital, is gutting for a community. But Tri-Cities residents — patients and doctors alike — say that the effects reverberated far beyond the hospital itself. In an area already burdened by barriers to health, the hospital closure made health care, from emergency care to routine doctor’s visits, that much harder to access.
“South Fulton County was a healthcare desert even before the closure of those two facilities. The desert got drier.” – Dr. Errol Crook, Morehouse School of Medicine Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs and Morehouse Healthcare Chief Medical Officer
Lifelong Tri-Cities resident Cleater Webb says the extended distance to medical care is especially difficult for seniors.
“Transportation, we can’t get around like we used to get around,” says Webb, who is 77 and lives in College Park. “A lot of times, it could just be that we don’t drive, or we don’t have a car…. Out here, the closest bus stop is on Camp Creek Parkway, and I would have to walk up the hill to get to it.”
Most of her peers, Webb says, have to either go to intown Atlanta for care, or trek out to Douglasville or Fayetteville. She has her own transportation to see her ophthalmologist at Emory, but acknowledges not everyone has that option.
In a state already beleaguered with health disparities — Georgia ranks near the bottom for overall healthcare, and its maternal mortality is among the worst in the country, according to data collected by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics — the Tri-Cities area bears an even heavier burden.
Hapeville, College Park, and East Point struggle with poverty rates and uninsured rates higher than the statewide average: Census data from 2022 showed that in all three cities, an average of about 19 percent of the population lived below the federal poverty level, while statewide that number is around 13 percent.
According to data collected by Morehouse School of Medicine, the average life expectancy in southern and central Fulton County has been five years lower than in the northern parts of the county. The data also found that the region was completely devoid of certain specialists like cardiologists, pulmonologists, and infectious disease doctors.
“South Fulton County was a healthcare desert even before the closure of those two facilities,” explains Dr. Errol Crook, senior associate dean for clinical affairs and chief medical officer for Morehouse School of Medicine. After the loss of two major area hospitals, Crook says, “the desert got drier.”
In the wake of Atlanta Medical Center South’s shuttering, a number of medical offices based at the facility or clustered nearby were forced to relocate or close their doors. Jackson recalls calling to make an appointment with her son’s pediatrician last year, only to learn that the practice had abruptly shut down. She now takes him to a practice in the Old Fourth Ward.
“I am willing to drive for decent care,” she says, “but it was very convenient to have a doctor five minutes down the road, especially when children need sick visits day-of.”
Dr. Michelle Cooke, a primary care doctor, estimates that up to five primary care practices in the area closed down as a result of the hospital shutting down. Cooke’s own Wellstar-owned Camp Creek office was initially among them, only to be reopened with a skeleton crew a few weeks later.
Specialists, who were already in short supply in the area, became fewer and farther between. “That building across the street from the hospital was filled with specialists,” says Cooke. “So people that were admitted to the hospital and had kidney failure or heart failure, and they needed to follow up with their cardiologist, their neurologist… all those services were at least right there, and almost all of them are gone now.”
Former Tri-Cities resident Dr. Ruby Thomas explains that specialists like gastroenterologists, who often need to be associated with a hospital system in order to do preventative screenings that require anesthesia (like colonoscopies), were left without a facility in which to do those procedures.
“So when you lose a hospital system, you lose those specialists,” Thomas says. “You lose that, we have to find you a new GI doctor, and that might be at Grady, or that might be out in Douglasville. It might be out in Fayetteville. When you lose a big system like that… it can make it a little more challenging to get people referred out to somewhere that’s convenient.”
Those losses are a recipe for even worse outcomes in a community already beset with challenges.
Rather than stay at the Camp Creek office, Cooke chose to establish her own private practice. In 2023, she opened Sol Direct Primary Care, which is now based in East Point and serves around 230 patients through a subscription-based model known as direct primary care. Cooke says that many of her patients come to her behind on routine care, having struggled to access preventative screenings or relying solely on urgent care to meet their medical needs.
Dr. Vickie James, another Tri-Cities primary care provider, has practiced medicine in College Park since 2009, when she opened her private practice, Essential Medical Care. Over time, she says, it’s become increasingly difficult for people in the community to find quality health care – and for doctors to keep their practices afloat.
“I’ve got plenty of folks who come in that haven’t had health care for more than five years,” says James. “I’ve heard people say, ‘You’re the fifth doctor’s office I’ve tried to get in [with] and nobody’s taking new patients, or nobody will see me,’ that kind of thing.”
The draining of an entire community healthcare ecosystem comes at an especially high cost to minority communities, for whom trust plays an especially important role in the doctor-patient relationship.
“There’s a bit of fear, trepidation, [and] distrust, especially in the Black community, toward doctors and medicine,” says Thomas. “So you have those issues, you have the social determinants, the lack of access to food, to transportation, all these other factors… the lack of a healthcare system. It’s sort of a recipe for bad outcomes.”
Today, the Atlanta Medical Center South hospital building remains empty. Crook says that the aging facility itself would likely require an entirely new build in order to meet today’s standards and regulations.
In the wake of Wellstar’s divestment from the region, community members, doctors, lawmakers, and public health experts are working to patch the holes — and to imagine more long-term solutions. In 2023, state lawmakers passed a resolution urging the cities of East Point and South Fulton to take action toward establishing a new hospital in the southern part of Fulton County, though no material plans have emerged.
“If you drive up to some street corners in north Fulton County, you have three different choices from three or four different healthcare systems on one block. So, that’s what our hope is: to bring choice in health care, for quality healthcare decisions and opportunities for the folks in these marginalized communities.” – Dr. Errol Crook, Morehouse School of Medicine Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs and Morehouse Healthcare Chief Medical Officer
Crucially, the wider region will have an emergency room again, though no longer in the heart of Tri-Cities, and not for a few more years. This fall, Grady Health Systems will break ground on a 20,000-square foot freestanding emergency department in Union City, projected to open sometime in 2026.
But, as Michelle Cooke says, “Maybe a couple times in your life you need a hospital, but everybody needs a primary care doctor.” In addition to independent providers like Cooke, institutions like Morehouse School of Medicine are working to make that option more available to people in the region.
Last fall, Morehouse School of Medicine opened a primary care clinic in East Point’s Buggyworks building, which Crook describes as the institution’s direct response to the crisis of access in the community. “We felt compelled that we needed to do something pretty quickly to show a signal of our commitment to the region in the short term, and our commitment to bringing something more in the long term,” he says.
Crook says that by expanding its footprint into the region, the institution hopes to bring more choice to Tri-Cities residents. “If you drive up to some street corners in north Fulton County, you have three different choices from three or four different healthcare systems on one block,” he says. “So, that’s what our hope is: to bring choice in health care, for quality healthcare decisions and opportunities for the folks in these marginalized communities.”
Jennifer Jackson says she’s noticed a few new doctor’s offices coming into her community, including the clinic at Buggyworks, which has been encouraging. “That’s helpful, and I’m glad to see it,” she says. But as someone without insurance, she can’t see these doctors unless she’s willing to pay cash. “But I could go to a hospital if I had an emergency situation,” she says. “So it would still be nice to have that down the street.”