Flintshire provides one quarter of Chester hospitals' work - look at an atlas.

In airports, shopping malls, convention centers, corporate boardrooms, supermarkets, street corners, dentist offices and hospitals, you can now find practitioners making chair massage as common and acceptable as a haircut.

For health care, I think we should have a program where the county might work with hospitals like Roseland, that do lots of charity care. Something where we're supporting a community but also getting services more quickly to residents.

Hospitals will work to be sure that they're within the standard of care.

The initiative's goal was not to drive business to one wholesaler, but to reduce pharmaceutical costs for participating hospitals. This regional effort was driven by our membership and really showed how hospitals can work together to affect change.

Hospitals that get sold are those that can't cover debt or get their debt-to-asset ratios way out of whack, and this hospital is likely to be in that situation for quite some time.