The Community Hospital Long Beach Task Force convened for the third time this year, on Monday, March 26, at the Long Beach VA Medical Center. The main talking points at Monday’s meeting were Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell’s Assembly Bill 2591, introduced in February to extend a seismic deadline for the hospital, and MemorialCare’s decision to divert emergency care from Community Hospital earlier this month.
MemorialCare’s separate announcements to terminate the hospital’s lease within 120 days, much sooner than anticipated, and diverting emergency care from the facility because of a low staff ratio added a not-so-welcome wrinkle to the already restricted deadline to preserve Community.
Then, MemorialCare’s CEO stated in an interview last week with the Signal Tribune there is “no chance” the hospital could be saved.
The Community Hospital Long Beach Task Force apparently still begs to differ, however, because officials at its meeting this week seemed eager to find viable solutions to the obstacles that have been presented.
The task force hosted its third meeting this year at the Long Beach VA Medical Center’s Learning Center, on Monday, March 26, in its quest to save Community after an announcement in early December that the facility would close down because of its placement on an active fault line and failure to meet the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development’s (OSHPD) seismic requirements.
Matthew Faulkner, executive director of the Community Hospital Long Beach Foundation, led the meeting with task-force co-chairs Michael Brascia and Ross Riddle.
Members formed sub-committees during the session to brainstorm ways to efficiently continue the task force’s “Save the ER” campaign and solve the aforementioned problems with the hospital.
Faulkner said the foundation hired a consulting firm that recently evaluated Community Hospital for re-design purposes, factoring in the facility’s aging buildings, fault-line risk and seismic activity, among other things.
Last Saturday, Faulkner met with a group of architects from the South Bay chapter of the AIA in Long Beach at Studio One Eleven, where the consultants and architects determined that long-term acute-care operations are viable on the site and that a concept could be worked to present to the City of Long Beach within the next few weeks, Faulkner said.
“We always have to remember that there is a longer-term solution in sight,” he told the Signal Tribune. “Although we are very fixated right now on how we can sustain the care— ideally the objective is to sustain the care and keep the facility open and then move to this more longer-term solution, obviously— but I was extremely encouraged by spending the morning with the architects, that they were creative and thoughtful and professional and very workman-like in configuring a possible layout of the campus that would work in the future.”
The task force’s planned community survey is now 75-percent complete, according to Faulkner. He said the survey by an independent-marketing research firm involved telephone interviews on the east side of Long Beach to gather input about Community. The full results will be available by the end of March or early April, Faulkner said.
The task force also distributed new “Save the ER” lawn signs to spread awareness of its campaign.
The City of Long Beach is seeking a five-year extension for Community Hospital to meet OSHPD’s seismic requirements, according to Diana Tang, the City of Long Beach’s manager of government affairs.
The City is a sponsor of California Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell’s Assembly Bill 2591, introduced in February as a means to buy more time for the east-side facility.
The standard length of time for an extension request is five years, Tang said during the task-force meeting. She explained that most hospitals that need to make seismic upgrades are either on a fault line or have aging buildings. Community Hospital happens to have both.
“Ours tend to be on the more difficult side of compliance, but we’re confident that we can find some hospital designers and experts in the industry that can help us figure out exactly what we can do and what can be possible at that site,” Tang said.
Most hospitals in the state that need to comply with OSHPD seismic requirements have the benefit of detailing their instruction plans, which documents their progress in meeting those goals, to OSHPD agencies. Community Hospital is challenged with not having that same level of detail because of MemorialCare’s time constraints, she said.
The road to adopting AB 2591 is one with many speed bumps.
Going through the legislative process, AB 2591 first needs to be heard in the policy committee, move forward to the appropriations committee and then go to the Assembly floor. The bill then proceeds to the Senate, where it “repeats the same dance,” and, finally, makes it to the governor’s desk. These steps will be taken, assuming the bill does not fall short in any of the aforementioned steps.
“That’s a lot of steps and a lot of hurdles that we need to clear,” Tang said. “If we fail one, then we don’t get to advance to the next one. It’s not like you can fail one, and then we go can go to the next one and come back. It doesn’t work that way. It’s five years. And, the more background material and the more substance that we can show along the way, the better our chances are.”
Tang said the first committee-hearing date for the bill would be sometime toward the end of April.
The Community Hospital Foundation is requesting personal letters from residents that detail their stories about how the facility has helped them through medical care. Letters may be submitted at SavetheER.com under the “Share Your Voice” tab.
In early March, MemorialCare announced it would terminate Community Hospital’s lease within 120 days because of staff shortages. Days later, the City of Long Beach wrote that MemorialCare communicated with the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency (EMS) to place Community Hospital’s emergency room on divert status, which ceased advanced life-support (ALS) services for patients.
During the task-force meeting, Herlinda Chico, field deputy for LA County 4th District Supervisor Janice Hahn, said one of the reasons ALS service was suspended at the facility was because of MemorialCare’s claim that there was no doctor in the intensive-care unit (ICU). EMS evaluated the facility and determined the hospital was understaffed.
“We’re looking at ways to assist Community Hospital to make sure that they meet all of the requirements to re-instate ALS,” she said. “Whatever that is. Whatever those requirements are, we’re trying to work with the hospital to make sure that they’re met.”
Jaclyn Baucum, health deputy for Hahn’s office, told the Signal Tribune Wednesday that EMS also put the hospital’s emergency room on divert because it wouldn’t be safe to transport patients to the facility and then secondarily transfer them to another medical space if Community wasn’t offering ALS services. It would waste treatment time.
When staffing ratios are where they need to be, the diversion will be lifted, Baucum said. MemorialCare also agreed to have a private ambulance company stationed in the parking lot to help facilitate secondary transports, if necessary.
Baucum speculated that it would be a difficult task to restaff a closing hospital, but she said there are physician services the hospital could contract to augment its staff.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Christa Indriolo, a labor representative at the California Nurses Association who lives a mile from Community Hospital and has been affiliated with the facility for 33 years, claimed that MemorialCare was misleading the public about its justification to place the emergency department on divert status, affirming that it’s never been necessary to have an intensivist, a physician who specializes in handling critical-care patients, to operate full-time in the ICU.
“We’ve never run that way,” she said. “[That] caused them to look at their regulation and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we should be diverting the patients, because that’s a problem.’ It’s a dishonest call, because they know that’s not how it’s ever been done […]. It’s not a regulation that we’ve ever needed to meet, and now they’re saying that they have to divert because we needed it. Memorial did that for its own agenda because they wanted to shut down.”
Indriolo said the hospital serves nearby schools and east-side residents, a group of the Long Beach population that no other medical facility could properly serve.
“I don’t know how anybody else can manage all those patients,” she said. “[…] It’s going to be a huge burden on them and a huge disservice to the people who live in that area.”
Dr. Mike Vasilomanolakis, with the MemorialCare system, said in a phone interview Wednesday that the need for an intensivist in the ICU on a 24-hour basis depends on the size of the hospital.
“That’s never been the issue,” he said. “Somehow, somebody tried to make the point that, ‘Well, you need 24-hours intensivists.’ No. You know, hospitals of that size do not have enormous intensive-care units that they require somebody to be there 24 hours. We have functioned for 94 years without having somebody in-house as an intensivist. So, it’s nothing new, nothing different, nothing that affects the standard of care. In the big hospitals with big units, when you have lots of lots patients, then it’s reasonable to have someone there. But, not in a smaller community hospital.”
Vasilomanolakis was skeptical of the diversion decision, partly because Community Hospital was accredited in January with no issues, he said.
In a phone interview Monday before the task-force meeting, Faulkner responded to MemorialCare CEO John Bishop’s statements from a March 23 Signal Tribune article, in which Bishop said “there is no chance” Community Hospital can be saved.
A criticism of eliminating Community Hospital’s emergency room is that it would impact east-side residents who would have to travel to the west side of the city to receive care, but Bishop said the hospital does not currently treat trauma patients and has not done so since MemorialCare acquired the facility in 2011.
Moreover, information MemorialCare provided last week to the Signal Tribune showed that an independent study analyzed local emergency departments and indicated that Community Hospital’s ER encompassed about 10 percent of total emergency visits in the area.
Faulkner said Bishop’s claims are inaccurate. Faulkner said the Long Beach Fire Department provided its own statistics that determines the number of emergency visits to the hospital is around 23 percent.
At the previous task-force meeting on Feb. 26, Mike DuRee, the fire department’s chief, said Community’s closure would displace about 5,000 patients who are transported by the fire department to the hospital’s emergency department every year. In total, the hospital’s emergency department cares for 20,000 local patients, according to DuRee.
“So, it’s another kind of dissemination of misinformation, we feel, that kind of paints a picture that it’s a low-servicing entity, it’s not critical to the east side, there’s plenty of other hospitals available, it only takes you about five minutes to get across town— I love that one,” Faulkner said. “Have you ever tried driving across Long Beach at 5pm? I mean, even if you are in an ambulance or a fire truck, what if the road’s blocked? This happened to me coming back from downtown. It took me a half an hour to get to my office. And, it really led me to believe that this is a real problem.”
Liz Odendahl, communications director with Supervisor Hahn’s office, told the Signal Tribune that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors hosted its board meeting on Tuesday and formally endorsed AB 2591. A public hearing is also scheduled on April 13 at an unspecified place in Long Beach to address EMS.
The Community Hospital Task Force’s next meeting will be Monday, April 30 at an undisclosed location.
