Nurses hustling and bustling about, beeping machines next to hospital beds and people – lots of people – helping or being helped. That’s what you usually encounter at a hospital, but not at this one. Here the sound that fills the rooms down the hallways is silence.
Colusa Regional Medical Center located in the city of Colusa has been shut down now for more than a month. The only life left behind its shuttered doors is that of about 10 staff members who for the time being are still working to complete admin tasks that will finalize the hospital’s abrupt closure where more than 200 employees were discharged.
Wayne Allen is one of the few who still remain. He’s the interim CEO of Colusa Regional Medical Center and the hospital’s chief restructuring officer. To put it another way – he’s the man who had to make the call to close down the hospital after being hired by the hospital’s board of directors in March.
“I knew in two or three days after my evaluation that it was an ugly situation and appeared to be only one possible outcome,” he said.
An ugly situation meaning the hospital was about $10 million in debt says Allen.
Residents have been asking how the hospital got into this situation. Theories range from low Medicaid and Medical reimbursements to an inefficient billing system to plain mismanagement to a combination of all of the above.
But Allen – who says he’s been working with struggling hospitals for 12 years – says the closure stemmed from the simple fact that it’s “very expensive to run a 24-hour, seven-day, 365 business and you have a lot of fixed overhead and that can’t be recaptured in a … it takes a certain volume of patients, and the volume just wasn’t there,” he said.
Now what’s left is a volume of people without nearby emergency medical services. Rideout Memorial Hospital in Yuba City is the closest hospital for most people. It’s about 25 miles away from Colusa. Other options include hospitals in Woodland and Willows. But really how far the nearest emergency services are depends on where you live in the county says Colusa City Interim City Manager and Fire Chief, Randy Dunn. Most people are looking at an at least 30-minute transport to the nearest emergency department, but maybe even a bigger issue says Dunn is the distance combined with a lack of ambulances.
“If you come from Colusa and you go to Rideout getting there and putting your ambulance back into service it’s probably a good hour and a half to two hours without an ambulance,” he said.
Because of this, the county has increased the ambulance service to two full-time ambulances contracted through Enloe, located in Colusa and Williams. Colusa County board supervisor John Loudoun also helped the Colusa’s fire department in purchasing a used basic life support ambulance to use as a backup.
“It’s a last resort,” he said. “If someone’s life is in peril, instead of just sitting there or put them in the back of a pickup or a car, at least we can transport to the closest ambulance or if we have to we can take them all the way to the emergency room.”
Back at the hospital, Allen explains that Colusa Regional’s emergency department was actually quite busy. He says they were seeing about 800 people through the doors each month.
Now it’s quiet, empty, desolate.
The big question is: will it stay that way?
Allen is currently searching for a buyer for the hospital. He has until August 9th to do so under a Notice of Default on the hospital’s lease given to him by the county. If he fails to find one, then the county will take over and take on the job in trying to reopen the facility.
Allen filed for bankruptcy on Friday. The idea is if the debt can be liquidated then the hospital will look much more enticing to the three prospective buyers Allen says he has on the line.
“Because a purchaser can come in and assume the operation with very little in the way of debt structure or nothing,” Allen said. “And they just got their start-up capital to bring people on board and things of that nature. So it helps with the rebirth of the hospital.”
Everyone I talked to is hopeful of that rebirth. But the fact is, the closing of Colusa Regional Medical Center is by no means a special case. Hospitals have been shutting down all over the country. According to data from the University of North Carolina’s Rural Health Research Program, 80 rural hospitals in the U.S. have shut down since 2010. Six of those have reopened.
It’s a statistical fact that can’t help but make you contemplate on whether or not Colusa County’s situation will become their new normal. A new normal that Allen says frankly puts residents at risk.
“One of the key things in health care talks about the critical hour and when you’re in a severe injury or episode of some type you need to get the appropriate level of care within 60 minutes, or your outcome is going to be highly compromised,” he said.
Until those emergency department doors reopen at Colusa Regional Medical Center, it is that critical hour.