John Keisler, the City of Long Beach’s director of economic and property development, provided updates during Monday’s task-force meeting at the Bixby Park Community Center about the City’s search for a new Community Hospital operator, the introduction of a new architectural firm for the facility and the end-of-May deadline to keep Assembly Bill 2591 alive.
During the Community Hospital Task Force meeting Monday, April 30 at the Bixby Park Community Center, John Keisler, the City of Long Beach’s director of economic and property development, explained it in terms of baseball— Community Hospital is playing in extra innings and is vying for a way to score a few runs to win the game.
“We found out at the bottom of the ninth inning that Memorial is not going to operate this facility,” he said. “So, we’re literally down by two runs at the top of the 10th inning.”
The runs Community is batting for are precisely what Keisler updated locals about during the task-force meeting Monday— the search for a new hospital operator, the introduction of a new architectural firm for the facility and the end-of-May deadline to keep Assembly Bill 2591 alive.
MemorialCare announced the facility’s closure in November because of an active fault line beneath the hospital and its failure to meet the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development’s (OSHPD) seismic regulations. At the time of purchase, MemorialCare was aware of Community’s fault line, but continual seismic reports at the 90-year-old facility in the past few years revealed the fault line was larger and posed a bigger threat than previously anticipated.
Currently, Community Hospital’s lease terminates July 3.
Last week, Community Hospital’s state license was renewed in time for its April 28 deadline, according to 4th District Councilmember Daryl Supernaw’s newsletter.
The City has put a “target request for information,” which means it can initiate conversation with any potential operators who are interested in Community Hospital, Keisler said during the meeting Monday. He said the City is communicating with those operators who submitted letters of interest about their conditions, proposals and other extensive details for the facility. The City is expecting three to four finalized letters of interest and candidates and about three weeks of negotiations.
Keisler said the City is looking for operators to meet certain criteria.
“I’m happy to say that there is interest from the market, but there are also constraints,” he said. “In terms of what that finalized mix of uses might look like, it has to have an emergency department, it has to have the basic services, it has to achieve licensing from the California Department of Public Health and there has to be a middle- and long-term plan for the capital improvement.”
The City’s self-imposed deadline for its operator search is May 15.
OSHPD established that Community Hospital must be seismically compliant by Jan. 1, 2020, and operators are concerned about not only bringing the building up to seismic compliance by that due date, but funding the endeavor. The cost to renovate and adjust the property to meet OSHPD standards would be roughly $2 million to $2.5 million per room, according to Keisler, and there is still a risk that Community Hospital would still not be compliant enough after that.
The negotiations will determine how much the operator and the City will each spend to fund Community’s OSHPD renovations.
The City has also performed a number of tours on-site with contractors and concluded there are several buildings that could be feasibly retrofitted.
“We’re going through that proposal, as well as other suggestions we have received from health-care management experts, to then get a cost proposal to actually do that kind of construction,” Keisler said.
At its April 17 meeting, the Long Beach City Council approved Councilmember Supernaw’s agenda item to provide $150,000 from his council district’s saving fund to pay for the City’s hiring of an architectural firm, which is Perkins+Will.
California’s 70th District Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell introduced Assembly Bill 2591 (AB 2591) in February to extend the hospital’s seismic-deadline compliance.
However, the bill hit a road block two weeks ago, when the Assembly Health Committee put O’Donnell’s bill on hold until the City of Long Beach could move forward with a tangible plan detailing how the building’s seismic compliance would be achieved.
According to Keisler, Diana Tang, the City of Long Beach’s manager of government affairs who championed for the deadline extension at a Community Hospital task-force meeting in March, presented the bill to the Assembly Health Committee.
O’Donnell told the Signal Tribune in April that other hospitals across the state with similar seismic issues had already engaged in extensive planning to address those problems.
The City is performing a number of steps to keep the bill alive, all of which need to be accomplished and presented by the end of May.
“We have to get a legislative change, an actual change to the law, for any extension,” Keisler said. “It’s not the state-regulatory agency that has this power, it’s not the City or the County that has this power, it is actually an act of the Legislature to extend the deadline by five years. And what that does is that it potentially gives us some time to do the short-term and maybe even some middle-term fixes to restructure the operation. […] That’s a critical, critical legislative action.”
Perkins+Will officials are communicating with OSHPD to aid in the development of a compliance plan, according to Keisler, who is confident that the bill will remain active so long as the City follows its own time line.
Keisler did note that the Community Hospital property has, “unfortunately,” been devalued by some of the rhetoric about the facility and the situation over the past few months.
The current priority and objective, however, is to keep the medical facility’s emergency department accessible to residents. The idea is to “limit disruptions” of those services as efficiently as possible and approach the issue as a whole in a segmented fashion, which would be locating an operator, working with the current architectural firm and addressing the postponed AB 2591.
“I think, given the time line, we have to address this incrementally,” Keisler said.
The City has given itself a four- to six-week deadline to accomplish its tasks.
On May 1, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to accept the findings of the county’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Agency impact-evaluation report released last week that noted Community’s closure would negatively affect local residents’ access to emergency-medical and psychiatric services, according to a press release from 4th District Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s office.
The closure significantly impacts the Long Beach, Signal Hill and northwest Seal Beach areas, according to the report, specifically indicating it would cause longer: travel times to reach other emergency departments; out-of-service times for EMS personnel in patient transports; and wait times for patients experiencing non-life-threatening illness or injury in emergency departments of surrounding hospitals. Moreover, the report shows there would be a loss of 30 critical-care beds and 28 psychiatric beds.
“This report confirms what we have been worried about since the beginning,” Hahn said in the press release. “Closing Community Medical Center will hurt Long Beach and Signal Hill residents’ access to medical care in emergencies and put a strain on the entire county’s emergency-services system.”
The impact report was based on public input at a hearing in April about Community Hospital’s potential closure. At the hearing, MemorialCare Health System CEO John Bishop had justified the decision to close the facility, also adding that efforts were being made to soften the blow of losing medical services in that area.
“I want to emphasize that we did explore all options to continue to provide critical-care services, and we spent nearly $1 million trying to find a solution, and we simply couldn’t,” Bishop said last month. He said it was becoming difficult to maintain the depth of resources necessary to keep Community operating as an acute-care medical facility.
In response to losing medical-care beds due to the hospital’s possible closure, Long Beach Medical Center increased its number of observation beds and converted medical-surgical and telemetry-monitor beds, Bishop said during the hearing.
Matthew Faulkner, executive director of the Community Hospital Long Beach Foundation, also provided the results of an unbiased survey about consumer demand for Community’s critical-care services.
The professors interviewed two focus groups, one that was familiar with Community’s resources— such as doctors and nurses— and the other that consisted of local residents who are unaffiliated with the hospital.
Faulkner told the Signal Tribune Thursday that the professors chose the focus groups to get an “unfiltered view” of the situation. Interviewing Service of America, a data-collection firm, was contracted separately to also aid in the survey and do telephone interviews over a two-week period with randomly-selected households.
The survey, released publicly this week at savetheer.com, echoes the EMS impact report, revealing that local demand for Community’s ER is high, but it also revealed that it is not the preferred medical facility for the majority of the participants— only less than half of those who were interviewed said Community was their facility of choice.
“The demand for services are strong, but the sense of coming to the facility is not high,” Faulkner said. “And, I believe, the aesthetics and marketing come to play.”
Faulkner remarked how, in his roughly 30 years of attending the hospital, he probably has not received one brochure promoting Community. He said the hospital has been undermarketed even prior to MemorialCare’s announcement that Community would close.
The findings in the survey include: the services and level of satisfaction respondents have of their local hospitals; the respondents’ awareness of the issues affecting Community Hospital; the importance of Community’s services; and socio-demographic information of survey respondents.
Community’s resources are important, according to the survey results, and Faulkner concluded that this reinforces the urgency to complete the steps necessary to keep the ER accessible and open.
“A casual glance at this data shows that we are absolutely right with our assertion that the ER is critical for our community,” Faulkner said. “That’s what’s being played up here with these comments.”
The next Community Hospital Long Beach Task Force meeting is scheduled for Monday, June 4 at an undisclosed location and time. Visit chlbfoundation.org and savetheer.com for more information.
