By Darrell Smith
The Sacramento Bee
GLENN COUNTY, Calf. — Glenn Medical Center in Willows has closed Glenn County’s lone emergency room, a move that could force residents to travel miles away to north state hospitals in Chico, Colusa, Marysville and Red Bluff for care as fire and emergency services scramble to close the gap.
Now Willows Fire Department and the cities of Willows and Orland are rushing to find solutions for the sudden hole in services. Officials are urging Glenn County residents to do the same, calling on potential patients to look into signing up for air ambulance services to ferry them to out-of-county hospitals.
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Willows is 85 miles north of Sacramento and the county seat for Glenn, which has a population of less than 30,000 people.
“With Glenn Medical Center’s closure, the likelihood of air medical transport for critically ill patients will increase. Community members are strongly encouraged to research and consider air ambulance membership or insurance programs,” Willows Fire Chief Nathan Monck said in an update on social media last week ahead of the planned Sept. 30 closure.
The loss of Glenn Medical Center’s ER will likely mean longer ambulance response times and more stress on Glenn County’s emergency management system, as ambulances drive to and from Chico’s Enloe Medical Center in Butte County, or St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff, Tehama County, said officials.
“Each family is encouraged to evaluate available options and make an informed decision about what best meets their needs,” Monck said in the Sept. 23 post. “In these uncertain times, it is vital for our community to stand together, address the challenges we face, and remain adaptable as new issues arise.”
The Willows facility closed its emergency department at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Officials last week cited staffing shortages as reason for the closure, but the hospital had also lost a critical federal designation that would have kept its ER open, according to the online campaign “Save Glenn Medical Center.”
The medical center’s outpatient clinics and services remain open.
Glenn Medical Center had been designated a Critical Access Hospital by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, one of nearly 40 such hospitals statewide.
The designation is for rural hospitals that have 25 or fewer beds, are more than 35 miles away from another hospital and provide 24-hour emergency care, seven days a week. It was created by the federal government following waves of rural hospital closures in the 1980s and 1990s. The rural critical access hospitals receive cost-reimbursement funding from the federal government.
Today, nearly 1,400 critical access hospitals are open across the U.S., according to Rural Health Information Hub, a digital medical clearinghouse.
But with Colusa Medical Center in neighboring Colusa County less than 35 miles away, the federal Medicare and Medicaid services stripped Glenn’s designation and ended the funding that came with it, despite “repeated appeals and extensive advocacy efforts to demonstrate the flaws in this determination,” said Save Glenn Medical Center advocates.
Monck said his Willows department expects to launch an “advanced life support” program in January that he said will allow firefighters to deliver higher levels of care on scene before patients are taken to a hospital.
Meantime, Monck said the department with the cities of Willows and Orland and Glenn County officials will conduct a joint study of its pre-hospital emergency medical services to find where services stand now and how they can be improved.
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