Editorial: A little love for ‘Pomerado’

Last week’s announcement that our local public hospital district is dropping “Pomerado” for its name, to become “Palomar Health” is both understandable and unfortunate.

With the opening of a new hospital in Escondido set for August, the district’s elected board of directors last month endorsed shortening the agency’s name and adopting a new logo.

Research by a firm hired by the district revealed that “Palomar Pomerado Health” was often hard to remember and that some people did not know how to pronounce “Pomerado.”

OK, we get it. That doesn’t mean that we have to like it.

A quick history lesson: In 1920 the old Merton and Bernardo school districts, their student numbers declining, decided to merge with the Poway school district. The new school entity was called “Pomerado,” a name created from the words POway, MERton and BernArDO. The district later became part of the Poway Unified School District.

Palomar Health started out in 1984 as the North San Diego County Healthcare District. It later was changed to the Palomar Pomerado Healthcare District and then to Palomar Pomerado Health System and finally to Palomar Pomerado Health. Clearly, name changes are nothing new for these folks.

Fortunately, the district has no plans to change the name of Pomerado Hospital in Poway. Good thing, we think. Most of us in Poway and Rancho Bernardo know how to both spell and pronounce our own little special word, Pomerado.

(By the way, this editorial has been posted on our website, which we can proudly say is www.pomeradonews.com.)

Short URL: http://www.pomeradonews.com/?p=22837

Posted by Steve Dreyer on Mar 28 2012. Filed under Editorial, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry