by Ali Tabatabai
Hillary shows up in the Mission Protesters march against Hillary Clinton’s visit in the Mission to a fundriser dinner event Nov. 18 (photo by Marvin J. Ramirez)
California Pacific Medical Center executives, community members, and medical staff from St. Luke’s Hospital convened again on Tuesday, to discuss the fate of the hospital before the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
At the health commission meeting, CPMC executives said they welcomed an open dialogue with the city and outlined their plan for transferring inpatient emergency services to other hospitals in the North of Market area. However, public health officials expressed their dissatisfaction with CPMC’s prior communication with the city about such cutbacks at St. Luke’s.
“It concerns me that [CPMC] is just now developing a dialogue with the commission and the health department,” said commissioner Chatherine Dodd.
Christopher Willrich, California Pacific’s vice president of strategy and business development, said CPMC hopes to explain its long term strategy for improving San Francisco’s healthcare infrastructure and that emergency care services could be absorbed at its other hospitals, including a proposed $1.7 billion new hospital on the Cathedral Hill Hotel site.
“We want to make sure that dollars spent and invested are going to lead to the maximum benefit for the community,” Willrich said.
However, physicians and nurses at St. Luke’s remain weary about the company’s intentions, as well as its numbers used to justify the hospital’s downgrades.
According to a statement released by hospital physicians, CPMC mislead the public when they claimed that 60 percent of the inpatient beds at St. Luke’s remain empty at any given time. The physicians say the figure is based on how many beds the hospital is licensed for, not the actual beds it currently has, which are occupied at 58 percent daily average rate.
“St. Luke’s faces an imminent collapse,” said Dr. Bonita Palmer, who contributed the statement, “Sutter [Health] no longer has plans for us to exist as a hospital at all.”
CPMC, an affiliate of Sutter Health, had originally planned to cut its pediatric and neonatal intensive care unit starting Nov. 16, eventually eliminating all long-term emergency stays and turning St. Luke’s into an outpatient ambulatory hub by 2009.
Those plans have been delayed, however, as CPMC failed to comply with a city ordinance requiring official notice be sent to the city’s health commission before such a closure.
A public hearing will be held in accordance with the law known as Proposition Q, at the Health Commission on Tuesday, Dec. 4.
