County Kept Hospital Closure Proposal From Public

A coalition of community members, hospital workers and patients is urging Sonoma County to begin a new and open process to review the proposed closure of Sutter Medical Center and the transfer of its healthcare obligations to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.

The call comes after recently released documents reveal that the County’s Department of Health Services knew for months that Sutter was planning to close the hospital, but kept that information from the public while reviewing the proposal in secret. The documents were uncovered through a Public Records Act request submitted to the County.    

"Up until this point, the discussion about the future of healthcare in the North Bay Region has taken place behind closed doors, without community input," said Michael Allen, spokesperson for State Senator Patricia Wiggins, at a press conference outside Memorial Hospital on Monday. "In order to protect the public, and other healthcare stakeholders, the County needs to invite members of the community into an inclusive process that will identify long-term solutions for access and delivery of healthcare to the entire North Bay. Decisions of this complexity and gravity are too important to be made without hearing the voices of the community."

Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa is a critical part of the healthcare safety net in Sonoma County. As the largest provider of Medi-Cal services in the county, it serves tens of thousands of patients, including nearly 31,000 Emergency Room visits in 2005 — roughly one-third of the county’s total for that year.

Plans to close the hospital on Chanate Road and shift Sutter’s commitments for patient care to Memorial were first disclosed to the public in January. But memos and e-mails from officials in the Department of Health Services, including Director Rita Scardaci, show they knew about the proposal as early as last October, if not before.

"The decision about whether to close our hospital must be made using a public process with the involvement of the community, not behind closed doors," said Sherrie Pepper, a lead Central Supply Technician at Sutter Medical Center Santa Rosa. "We the caregivers at Sutter urge County officials to begin this process now."

Sutter Health leased the Chanate facility from the County in 1996, when it signed a detailed, 20-year contract to provide a number of services, including indigent care, sexual assault crisis services, HIV early intervention, and maintaining the longstanding Family Practice Residency program.

Sutter and Memorial officials have said they will negotiate jointly with the County regarding these obligations, but no detailed plans have been made available to the public.

"Right now, through their contract with the County, Sutter is explicitly required to provide care for the indigent," said Stephen Harper of the Housing Advocacy Group. "If Sutter is allowed to close, the County will lose a vital safety net for people who can least afford that kind of uncertainty."

Additionally, workers at both hospitals say it’s not clear how Memorial Hospital, which is operated by St. Joseph Health System of Orange County, could safely handle the increased demand that Sutter’s closure would drive there. Closing Sutter would mean a loss of 163 hospital beds countywide, yet Memorial only plans to add 80 new beds over the next five years.

"While Memorial says they have plans to meet the increased need, many of these plans are years away," said Buddy Bosanco, a telemetry technician and spokesperson for the healthcare workers union at Memorial Hospital. "In the meantime, they’ve got no clear plan for how we will handle the increase in patients. We need a real assessment of how and when Memorial will be able to meet the needs of patients in our County if Sutter closes."

Caregivers at Memorial have also been calling on hospital management to agree to ground rules for a fair union election process, as similar processes already exist at Sutter, Kaiser, and Catholic Healthcare West hospitals.