By Elise Kleeman
San Gabriel Valley Tribune
Copyright 2007 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
PASADENA, Calif. — Throughout Southern California, hospital emergency departments are being stretched to their limits.
Pasadena is not exempt.
At Huntington Hospital, the emergency room built for 36,000 patient visits per year now sees about 65,000, officials said.
However, that could change in the next few years.
At this past week’s City Council meeting, city staff reported the hospital was beginning the approval process for a 54,500-square-foot expansion that will include 22,100 square feet of new emergency room space.
The proposed multistory structure on the hospital’s east side would increase its total emergency room capacity to 80,000 patients per year and is expected to be enough to support the community for the next 10 years.
“We certainly know that expanded emergency facilities in the city of Pasadena are absolutely critical at this point in time,” said Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard.
Even with the proposed expansion, however, the shortage of emergency department care in the area looms large.
“It’s a major, major problem,” said Jennifer Bayer, spokeswoman for the Hospital Association of Southern California.
“In Los Angeles County, there have been 11 (hospital) closures in the last five years. For the state there have been 70 hospitals that have been closed in the past 10 years.”
Though the highly publicized recent closure of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital’s emergency department occurred because of safety concerns, it was financial pressure that caused most of the other hospitals to buckle.
“A third of hospitals are losing money. Of those, half have a rating that is equal to junk-bond status,” Bayer said.
With increases in the region’s population, the burden of uninsured patients, an overwhelming shortage of nurses, physicians, laboratory technicians and pharmacists, and seismic reinforcements guidelines to abide by, “no other industry on the planet faces the same challenges as the hospital industry,” she said.
Making things worse, as some hospitals or emergency departments close, the demand shifts to others, creating an domino effect.
In Pasadena, the 2002 closure of St. Luke Medical Center nearly doubled the number of patient visits to Huntington’s emergency department, said hospital spokeswoman Andrea Stradling.
“Our emergency department is currently under-sized for the community that we’re serving,” said Jeanette Abundis, the emergency department’s director.
At nearby Methodist Hospital in Arcadia, the closure of St. Luke and other area hospitals, combined with an increasing and aging population, caused emergency room visits to jump from 32,076 in 2001 to 38,665 in 2006, said hospital spokesman Tony Yang.
“There are ripple effects which definitely impact us, even from hospitals that are farther away,” he said.
For the public, the effect is similarly far-reaching.
“You could be the most well-insured person on the planet, but you’ll still feel it, because if the emergency room is full, it’s full. If the hospital is full, it’s full,” Bayer said.
Finding care for the most severe injuries is even more difficult. Huntington is the only hospital in the San Gabriel Valley that has the highly trained surgical teams necessary to be considered a trauma center.
To the east, the next closest trauma centers are Loma Linda University Medical Center and Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton, Abundis said.
There used to be more, including one at Citrus Valley Medical Center-Queen of the Valley in West Covina. That trauma center closed in 1987.
“It was just a financial burden that Queen of the Valley was finding too difficult,” said Irene Bourdon, the hospital’s senior vice president of strategic and corporate development.
Even finding enough specialized surgeons, she said, was difficult.
While Citrus Valley’s emergency department remains open, it has been running at capacity for several years, forcing 2,500 hours of ambulance diversions last year.
Although Citrus has no immediate plans to expand, its sister campus, Foothill Presbyterian Hospital in Glendora, will open a new, larger emergency room this fall, Bourdon said.
In Pasadena, the first stage of construction on Huntington Hospital’s emergency department expansion is expected to begin in January.
Fundraising efforts have raised $20 million of the $55 million needed for the project, of which $34 million is earmarked for the emergency department and the remainder for surgical services and other future uses.