Thread: Another Emergency Room To Close

It doesnt suprise me at all...the illegals are ruining our healthcare system big time!!!

Emergency Room In Inglewood To Close

http://www.nbc4.tv/news/9888179/detail.html

INGLEWOOD, Calif. -- Centinela Freeman HealthSystem announced Monday it plans to close the emergency room at its Memorial campus, despite opposition from Inglewood officials and community members.

Centinela Freeman officials are filing plans with Los Angeles County to combine Memorial's emergency department with the one at the Centinela campus about one and a half miles away.

County health officials were not immediately available to comment on the announcement.

In place of the Memorial emergency department, an urgent care facility will open to handle non-emergency cases, according to hospital officials. Another urgent care center will open on the Centinela campus in November.

"This has been an extremely difficult set of decisions, and we've made them only after extensive analysis of all possible options," said Michael Rembis, chief executive officer of Centinela Freeman HealthSystem.

"These changes are designed to meet the multiple long-term needs of our employees and the community by stabilizing the Memorial campus, which has lost more than $85 million over the last five years, and offering more options for urgent and primary care," Rembis said.

Formerly known as Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, the Memorial facility treated about 38,000 patients in its emergency room last year. Centinela treated about the same number.

Hospital officials said the proposal to close the Memorial campus emergency room arose from a study that found 60 percent of the patients visiting the facilities were not emergency cases.

Another study by Navigant Consulting found Inglewood needs an additional 160 family and general practice physicians, and 103 internal medicine physicians, to meet the area's health care needs, according to Centinela officials.

"With two-thirds of emergency department patients being treated for non-emergency needs and with a severe shortage of primary care and internal medicine physicians, we, as a community, need to re-evaluate how health care is delivered to our residents," Rembis said.

Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn has spoken out against closing the emergency room in the past, but city officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

On Thursday, Dorn, Councilman Curren Price and Assemblyman Jerome Horton, D-Inglewood, will host a town meeting at First Church of God to discuss the closure.

"I'm very concerned about the looming crisis awaiting our hospital and our patients because one hospital simply can't handle this kind of patient volume," said Michael Fenison, a Centinela Hospital employee with SEIU United Healthcare Workers.

"We intend to hold the health system accountable to ensure that there are no disruptions in the delivery of patient care," he said.

The emergency room at Memorial must remain open at least until mid-December because of an agreement between the state attorney general and Tenet Healthcare Corp., the hospital's former owner.

When Tenet purchased Daniel Freeman Memorial from a nonprofit chain in 2001, it agreed not to close the emergency room for at least five years.

This is bad in one way but good in another. If the majority of the cases are not true emergencies it is not cost effective. It is probably due to illegals going for non urgent care as it would be free to them. An urgent care center is less costly to run as they do not deal with critical cases and therefore they do not need many highly specialized staff members. This may also save the taxpayers alot of money in the end.

Hospital officials said the proposal to close the Memorial campus emergency room arose from a study that found 60 percent of the patients visiting the facilities were not emergency cases.

Why don't they just come out and admit that the majority of the 60 percent non-emergency ER users are illegal immigrants? In order to fix the problem, the facts have to be made public.

And coming to your local emergency room........

All this reminds of a story my daughter got off the internet. Some guy was ill and wanted to go to emergency and realized it would be full due to illegals. In order to get in quicker he wore something with the border patrol patch and went to the hospital. His waiting period was not long as all the illegals took off.