At meeting, Long Beach fire chief informs Community Hospital Task Force that closure will displace patients; group also encourages residents to write letters in support of facility

It’s as if locals are mourning the loss of something that hasn’t even passed on yet, because residents, employees and even the CEO of MemorialCare are spreading word of the supposed confirmed closure of Community Hospital Long Beach, a medical facility that has been serving the east side of the city for years, according to those in attendance at a recent meeting.
The Community Hospital Task Force is convinced the site can be saved, and at its second congregation this year at the Assistance League of Long Beach headquarters, 6220 E. Spring St., on Monday, Feb. 26, the group continued its discussion from its previous meeting about not only finding viable ways to maintain the facility, including the renewal of licenses and locating an equity partner, but also convincing residents and even its own employees that the hospital’s closure is not a done deal.
Late last year, Long Beach MemorialCare announced that Community Hospital would end medical services in 2019 as a result of an active fault line located beneath the facility that could pose as a seismic threat to the structure. The hospital has a June 30, 2019 deadline to meet the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development’s (OSHPD) earthquake-safety standards.
The task force is also seeking to extend its acute-psychiatric and general acute-care medical licenses, which will expire April 28, 2018, with the California Department of Public Health.
Part of saving the hospital involves implementing what Matthew Faulkner, executive director of the Community Hospital Long Beach Foundation, called a “three-prong strategy,” which is centered around Assembly Bill 2591 (AB 2591), introduced in February by Patrick O’Donnell, California’s 70th district assemblymember, that seeks an extension for the seismic compliance at the hospital.
In a February press release, O’Donnell said, “Community Hospital offers the only emergency room on the east side of the city. This is the first of many steps necessary to keep the hospital open. I look forward to working with community stakeholders to find a solution to this challenge. AB 2591 gives us more time to identify options to meet our community’s needs.”
The three-step strategy will help the bill move forward, Faulkner said.
Step one encourages residents to demonstrate community support of the hospital through physical letters directed to elected leaders in the State Legislature that detail personal stories of how the medical facility has provided life-saving care for them or their families.
Faulkner said the Community Hospital website— chlbfoundation.org— will be updated soon to outline how residents can format, write and send their letters. Residents may also find ways to submit their personal letters to O’Donnell’s office or via his website at a70.asmdc.org.
Step two is building trust with the state agency and communicating that the facility is seeking an extension of operations, per the legislation.
Step three is demonstrating tactical competency, which means making progress toward meeting the hospital’s seismic goals.
Faulkner said O’Donnell’s bill will go to the Assembly floor between May 29 and June 1 for votes, it will then eventually move to the Senate for votes in August and the last day for Governor Jerry Brown to sign or veto a bill will be Sept. 30.
“It’s good news that we have this legislation,” Faulkner said. “We’re very encouraged. It doesn’t mean that we’re anywhere out of the woods, but it does mean that we’ve been heard and, to me, that’s a testament to successful advocacy, and I think we’ve achieved that in round one.”
Those at the meeting also expressed concern about how some nurses and patients at the facility and around the city have been vocal about the hospital’s closure, implying that there are no alternatives to save it. The task force recommended the use of social media, door hangers, billboards and other outreach efforts to communicate with residents that the hospital is not officially gone just yet.
The possibility of Community Hospital’s end prompts the question of where some patients will receive their care, specifically the estimated 5,000 local residents the Long Beach Fire Department (LBFD) transports to the facility’s emergency department every year, according to Mike DuRee, the LBFD’s fire chief, who detailed the fire department’s role in the struggle to maintain the hospital. He said a total of 20,000 patients go into the emergency room every year.
“The bottom line is, as of today, right now, we do not have a definitive solution on how to deal with those 5,000 patients,” he told the task force. “I can’t tell you exactly what that’s going to look like, but I can tell you intuitively […] that our system is going to be disrupted.”
Spreading the patients amongst the other Long Beach hospitals will contribute to more inundation problems that California and, specifically Long Beach, have been experiencing for years, DuRee said.
The LBFD routinely transports low-acuity patients to a local emergency department in its basic life-support (BLS) ambulance. The fire chief explained that low-acuity patients do not take priority over those who have life-altering issues, such as chest pain or shortness of breath, so they often end up waiting on the gurney at hospitals for a minimum of 45 minutes to a maximum of four to four-and-a-half hours. The consequence is that LBFD personnel are unable to abandon care for the patient and respond to another call in the community until he or she has been transferred to a bed in the emergency department.
“That’s not OK with me, because your expectations as a community are that, when you call 911, we are going to show up in four to six minutes, and four triathletes are going to get off that rig and take care of your situation, whatever it could be,” DuRee said. “[…] I am responsible for making sure that I meet your expectations as a community. I’m not here to meet the expectations of the board of directors for any for-profit company. That’s not my job.”
Herlinda Chico, field deputy for 4th District LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn, also pointed out at the meeting that local police officers are also taken off the streets when they have to take a patient to the hospital, adding that it may not be as impactful as the situation may be on the LBFD, but it is still something to be concerned about.
DuRee said he has expressed his concerns with John Bishop, chief executive with MemorialCare, who has consistently convened with the fire chief’s command staff to discuss the issue. Per the fire chief, Bishop told him that he agreed that it’s a problem and that a solution needs to be developed by moving the observation-bed patients either to another floor or to another area in the emergency department.

Another solution is developing something that DuRee called “alternate-destination scenarios,” which involves driving the patient to urgent care rather than emergency care, depending on the nature of aid that is required.
“As it stands right now, it’s not legal for me as a paramedic ambulance to transport somebody to any place other than an emergency department in a hospital,” he said. “Well, you guys know as well as I do that’s kind of a ridiculous proposition nowadays. When you have really high-functioning urgent cares in certain places, where somebody has a twisted ankle, we can easily take him or her to an urgency care, potentially have them treated and then give him a referral to an orthopedist. They don’t necessarily need to go to that emergency department and inundate that system. […] We’re working very, very closely with state-elected officials, our county supervisors, our local councilmembers to try and develop alternate-destination scenarios, where we take those patients who have the twisted ankle to urgent care. […] We get them where they need to be versus the emergency department.”
As DuRee mentioned, however, if Community Hospital does close and those 5,000-plus patients are unaccounted for, it will cause a disruption in medical services in the area. The fire chief did optimistically note that Bishop and his staff have expressed their intentions to minimize the effects, and DuRee will simply trust in his word that they will find a solution.
Faulkner said new focus groups were established in February to conduct a survey, in conjunction with Cal State Long Beach, for residents and asking them “Do you want lifesaving care?” Updates on the study are expected to be revealed at the next meeting.
Faulkner said the Community Hospital Long Beach task force’s next meeting will be on Wednesday, March 28, at 5pm at an undisclosed location. The meeting will be open to the public. Visit chlbfoundation.org for more information.