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Delaware County’s largest hospital system is running on fumes.

A $20 million allotment of funding from the Foundation for Delaware County will keep Crozer Health operational in the immediate future, but what happens beyond the next few weeks is unclear.

Just two of Crozer Health’s four hospitals — Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Taylor Hospital — remain open. Prospect Medical Holdings, Crozer’s for-profit parent company, is still trying to sell the ailing system to new ownership.

Attorneys for the California-based hospital chain told a Texas bankruptcy judge Monday that Prospect is “progressing towards a transaction” with Penn Medicine and the foundation.

“It sounds like we’re on the verge of breathing a sigh of relief,” U.S. bankruptcy Judge Stacey G. C. Jernigan, of the Northern District of Texas, said during the virtual meeting.

Although a surprise legal fight nearly upended progress last week, discussions are back on track. The hope is for Prospect to sign an asset purchase agreement with a buyer to take the reins of the financially distressed hospital system before the coffers run dry.

However, the history of previous prospective suitors backing out of deals to acquire Crozer brings an added layer of uncertainty.

‘This hospital is my world’: Crozer nurse reflects on how hospital became home

The threat of potential closure, although seemingly diminished, presents an existential crisis for Crozer’s thousands of employees who call the flagship hospital home and communities who rely on it.

“This hospital is my world,” nurse Susan Lawson said. “My home life revolves around my work life. It probably should be the other way around, but I’ve dedicated my life since 2007 to this hospital.”

Nursing was a second career for Lawson. Her fondest memories — giving birth to both of her children — occurred at Crozer-Chester Medical Center’s 68-acre campus in Upland Borough. Her maiden name, McClintock, is synonymous with the borough. Members of her family have served the community in various ways.

When she commutes to work from Aston, she takes McClintock Drive. She chose to work at Crozer-Chester Medical Center rather than apply to Riddle Hospital in Media because she wanted to serve a population that needed her help “the most.” Lawson expected to retire at Crozer, and still does.

“It’s very unsettling,” the Brookhaven-born nurse said. “I’m not sleeping very well. The future that I had planned out is in jeopardy. I’m not sure which way we’re going to go, but I feel confident that the hospital will stay open.”

Even in its reduced state, Crozer-Chester Medical Center is home to the county’s primary trauma center and its only burn unit. The system is the region’s main EMS provider.

In its heyday, the hospital and the broader system managed even more responsibilities.

“We’ve had a wonderful stroke unit,” social worker Adrienne Burns said. “We had a neurointensive care unit. Any service that our community needed, you just came to Crozer. We had three pavilions that were filled with doctors’ offices. Everybody came there for their outpatient patient care. The parking lots were filled with employees [and] with patients. The halls were hustling and bustling with people coming and going.”

A three-minute delay in the morning commute would mean losing a valuable parking spot, Burns said. Continuous traffic on the campus was a constant. Patients often traveled from other hospitals for care.

“It’s quieter,” Burns said. “It feels lonely.”

Burns works in the intensive care unit. She is the “sense of peace” for people who are often in the hospital at their lowest moment. Grieving families lean on her for support. The Fulcroft native said she grew up and matured with her colleagues during her nearly 40 years at Crozer.

“We’ve learned to work together. We’ve cried together. We laughed together. We’ve argued with one another. We worked it out and we kept it moving, and we were always — and we still are a united front in taking care of the patients and the families,” Burns said.

Burns said some staff members are panicking and worrying about the threat of being forced into making a difficult life decision in the event of a closure. Patients are upset too. She recently overheard a frantic conversation in the halls between two seniors who wondered where their treatment would come if the hospital closed its doors.

“There’s enough worries in this world,” Burns said. “They don’t need to be worrying about ‘where I am going to go for my health care.’”

‘People are going to literally die’: What a potential Crozer closure would mean for Chester

Before former Chester Police Captain Alan Davis retired to his home in West Chester, his daily ritual for more than two decades involved a nightly trip to Crozer-Chester Medical Center.

“I would make coffee and kind of clean up because nurses would always be busy and slammed with trauma, so I would kind of clean up, straighten up and make a fresh pot of coffee for everybody,” Davis said.

However, in March 2016, an attempt to locate a stolen vehicle turned into a deadly confrontation at the intersection of Parker and Union streets that permanently upended his routine.

The first bullet pierced Davis’ arm, hitting a major artery. The second bullet ripped into his side before settling into his back.

Once the shooting subsided, Davis called out for a tourniquet. Blood seeped into the white top of his uniform as he was loaded into the passenger side of a police vehicle. Within five minutes, he was at Crozer-Chester Medical Center.

He provided the doctors and nurses, whom he shared a bond with, all his personal information before he was given anesthesia. The surgeons decided to leave the bullet fragment in his side in order to save his arm. The gunshot wound caused compartment syndrome — in other words, restricted blood flow and damage to his nerves.

Davis woke up 11 days — and nine surgeries — later. The shooting ended his 27-year career with the force. He can’t feel his right forearm or move his hand. Phantom pains still haunt him. However, he is grateful, and credits the staff at Crozer-Chester Medical Center with saving his life.

“I know an arterial bleed, I know how serious it is,” Davis said. “I know you basically only have minutes before you’re out of blood.”

Davis said even “with lights and sirens,” the closest available trauma centers at Penn Presbyterian in West Philadelphia or Christiana Hospital in Newark are 30 minutes away. Before he was a Crozer patient, he witnessed many miracles — gunshot victims clinging to life on the scene before recuperating at the hospital.

“It was just amazing how many people they saved, and without them, Chester’s homicide rate would double, triple from what it is now,” Davis said.

Chester City Health Commissioner Dr. Kristin Motley never thought she would entertain the idea of Crozer shutting its doors. She gave birth to two children at the hospital.

“It’s just unbelievable to me,” she said.

Motley believes the stakes are too high not to sound the alarm. Poor social determinants of health overwhelm Chester. The predominantly Black city is among the poorest in Pennsylvania. A state-appointed receiver filed for bankruptcy on behalf of the city in 2022.

The Chester-Upland School District is in financial disarray. One of the nation’s largest incinerators burns 3,500 tons of trash a day in Chester, prompting fears of environmental racism. The city has the highest infant mortality rate in the state.

“Because of all the diseases that plague our town, including asthma, infant mortality, if you do not have a hospital here, what are you going to do for the people that have the diseases? Where are they going to go? There’s no close hospital. And so it’s going to mean everything. People are going to literally die,” Motley said.

There are no private practice primary care physicians left in Chester. Motley said ChesPenn Health Services, the community health center, doesn’t have the capacity to take care of all of the city’s approximately 34,000 residents.

“I think we all need to be looking at what are sustainable ways to keep a safety net hospital open in the community that needs it the most. This is not a community that can afford to lose any access to health care, let alone a hospital, a trauma center, a burn center,” Motley said.

Crozer doctor: Admission rates are as high as 30 percent

Dr. Max Cooper doesn’t share the same Delco roots as many of his colleagues. He grew up in western Connecticut and went to medical school at Jefferson University. However, he took root at Crozer in 2018 to jumpstart a training program and to be involved with the community.

When he arrived at Crozer, he said there was something different about the atmosphere.

“There was a sense of renewal and upswing,” Cooper said. “It was clear that the facilities were being invested in.”

Nurse Jennifer Mattero, who started around the same time as Cooper, recalled thinking about how working at Crozer-Chester Medical Center was the first time she was “excited” about clocking in each day.

Both Cooper and Mattero noticed a shift in the hospital following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Slowly, as time has gone on, every year it seems like more things are getting cut,” Mattero said. “Nurses are leaving. We don’t have the supplies that we need. Like just today, I had to go to one of the other ICUs five or six times just to get the supplies I needed for my patient in my unit.”

Some of the equipment is breaking down. Patients who are hypervigilant about the physical condition of the hospital — and have the resources to travel farther — are seeking treatment elsewhere, Cooper said.

“There’s like wings of the hospital which are empty and locked and there’s no nurses, doctors, patients occupying those rooms,” Cooper said. “They are essentially empty rooms with furniture in it.”

According to Cooper, the total number of people coming to Crozer is decreasing. However, the percentage of admissions is increasing because “only the sickest of the sick people,” are pushing to get into the hospital.

“We have an admission rate on some days as high as 30%, which is really astronomically high,” Cooper said.

The whirlwind of changes and cuts have negatively impacted morale, but Mattero said it also had another effect — bringing people together.

“These people are like truly my blood,” she said. “I really feel that way. It’s just I think because of all of the turmoil that the hospital system has been going through, it has kind of banded us all together when we don’t have the things that we need, we have to rely on each other a lot more.”

Burns, the social worker, finds herself using the same techniques with her colleagues that she’s employed for nervous families. Debriefing with each other through the turmoil has kept their work family sane and optimistic.

“I just love what I do and I love where I am, and I love the environment. I love the people we work with and I want it to get back to a resemblance of what we were,” Burns said.

Cooper said he views the recent monetary investments into keeping the hospital open as a good sign.

“There must be some end in sight that the people at the table see, and so I think there’s a sense of optimism and hope among the clinical staff that this is salvageable,” Cooper said. “We’re on life support right now, but we’re not a terminal case. And so we’re really hoping that something comes from this.”

Editor’s note: The Foundation for Delaware County is a WHYY supporter. WHYY News produces independent, fact-based news content for audiences in Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey.