‘Where do they go?’: Crozer health providers worry about patients as closure of Delco hospitals nears

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Tears of anger and devastation, desperate pleas for a “hail mary” and a public stand by health care and emergency medical workers Tuesday afternoon were not enough to save Crozer Health hospitals from doom as closure plans proceeded forward.

“This is going to devastate our entire community,” said Peggy Malone, union president of the Crozer-Chester Nurses Association.

Crozer Health employees and local lawmakers continued to hope for a “hero” to rescue Delaware County’s largest health system.

But, barely hours after their public appeal, a bankruptcy hearing in the Northern District of Texas erased any optimism.

“Unfortunately, it looks like our only option before us is closure,” U.S. Judge Stacey G. C. Jernigan said.

Attorneys for bankrupt California-based parent company Prospect Medical Holdings said without support for payroll and overhead, the company needed to wind down operations to safely transfer patients to other hospitals and pay wages.

Nearly all patient services at Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park are set to close by April 28, and at Crozer Chester Medical Center in Upland by May 2, with the exception of home health care services, which will continue at both facilities through May 11, according to court documents.

Health system leaders said those deadlines are dependent on the safe transfers of patients and are subject to change.

“Quite frankly, we did everything we could,” said Bill Curtin, who represents Prospect. “At the end of the day, your honor, it came down to funding.

Jernigan acknowledged the “widespread consequences” of the closure, but said the parties “can’t print money.”

The cost of closing the two hospitals will be $20 million to $30 million, Paul Rundell, Prospect’s chief restructuring officer, said. To help pay for it, health system owners said they plan to sell several Crozer Health ambulatory surgical centers that will remain open and are not affected by the latest closures.

Patients will be diverted to other hospitals and the health system is actively working with county and state health departments, regulators and a patient care ombudsman to facilitate the transfers.

Crozer Health emergency departments will continue seeing walk-in patients for trauma care, but people will eventually be directed to seek care at other hospitals. Ambulances will be stationed outside the emergency departments to bring people elsewhere after services completely stop.

Crozer employees ‘pray for a miracle’

Frontline health care workers, some of whom were on the verge of tears, gathered outside of Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland ahead of the hearing. They wondered aloud why no one stepped up to save their patients.

“Where do they go? They die,” said Peggy Malone, president of the Crozer-Chester Nurses Association.

More than 2,600 employees will lose their jobs over the next couple of weeks as Prospect shutters operations at Crozer-Chester, Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park and other ancillary locations, leaving a gaping hole in Delaware County’s health care system.

“People are going to die on the way to the hospital,” Crozer paramedic Bill McCall said.

The city of Chester is infamously without a private care physician within its boundaries and residents subsequently suffer from disproportionately poor health outcomes. For many community members, Crozer-Chester is a vital resource for care.

“I don’t believe that these monsters can be this evil that they come in and they shut these doors and they take away the only resource — sometimes the only family that these patients have,” Malone said.

Melanie McKendry, a lead medical assistant within Crozer, and her colleagues spent their morning informing patients their care would cease within days.

“Imagine being diagnosed with cancer,” she said. “You’re stage three. You’re introduced to your oncologist. You get your surgery set and scheduled and you’re so happy that you’re finally going to get a treatment plan — and get told two days before your pre-admission testing that ‘we can’t treat you’ and you have to find some place else to go. Is that fair? Does anybody think that’s fair?”

Dr. Max Cooper envisioned wrapping up his career at Crozer when he arrived seven years ago. This is not how he wanted his tenure to end, he said. He and his colleagues saved a patient from a heart attack Tuesday morning.

He said if the patient had to travel farther to Riddle Hospital in Media, or ​​Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in West Philadelphia, the patient would have died. Cooper asserted the nightmare scenario could be the new normal.

“This isn’t an accident. This isn’t an ‘Oops.’ This is planned. This is on purpose and this is criminal and they need to be held to account,” Cooper said.

Following Monday’s news of Crozer’s pending shutdown, Pennsylvania officials signaled their desire to recoup taxpayer dollars that went to Prospect to keep the hospitals open during negotiations.

“We’re hoping that you guys can claw back millions of dollars from Prospect’s cold dead body,” Cooper said. “And when you do, I hope that you can set it aside and think to this community’s future and how we can rebuild our health care system.”