Hope Prevails Despite Plan to Close Emergency Room

Spirits in the emergency room at San Diego Physicians & Surgeons Hospital were high Monday as doctors hoped for a solution to the hospital’s financial problems and the recent announcement that its emergency room will close March 28, authorities said.

“There’s hope up until the day it closes,” said Tom Hennessy, chief executive officer for the hospital, which serves Southeast San Diego. “If some solution to the funding problem can be found, there’s a chance that the department can remain open.”

But a specific solution is nowhere in sight. National Medical Enterprises, which operates the hospital, announced Friday that it will close the emergency room because of “serious financial losses.” Don Griffin, vice president of business development for NME, said the company had lost more than $20 million since 1982, primarily because of inadequate reimbursement from the federal government.

“San Diego Physicians & Surgeons Hospital finds itself in a situation like so many other hospitals in the state of California, and it is faced with no alternative other than to close its emergency room or continue to face disastrous financial implications,” Michael H. Focht Sr., president of NME, said in a statement about the closure.

The hospital’s contracts with the County Medical Services and the County Jail will also be terminated.

Have to Find Other Hospital

Asked where people in the area would go for walk-in care, Griffin said: “The reason we issued notice on Friday was to inform patients in the area that we’d no longer be providing emergency service, and by the time March 28 comes, they should have identified other places to go.”

Griffin said that, according to the American Medical Assn., one out of seven hospitals in the country will close in the next two years.

The closest hospital is Paradise Valley in National City, which also has announced plans to close its emergency room in May. UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest and Mercy Hospital will probably receive more patients when the emergency room at Physicians & Surgeons closes, authorities said.

In May, NME announced plans to sell the hospital to Nationwide Medical Systems of Perris, Calif. The sale was finally rejected, Griffin said Monday, because the city of San Diego refused to grant clear title to the property.

But City Councilman Wes Pratt said NME and Nationwide had failed to convince the city that they planned to continue to operate the facility as a hospital. “There was no reasonable assurance that what they were proposing was going to work . . . and there was no assurance that they were going to operate as a hospital,” he said.

An aide for County Supervisor Leon Williams, who represents the central-region residents who use the emergency room at Physicians & Surgeons, said the supervisor was extremely disappointed and his staff is working to keep the department open.

“We are not prepared to allow those people in Southeast San Diego who were serviced by Physicians & Surgeons Hospital to go wanting for medical services,” said aide Neal Arthur.

Meanwhile, Hennessy said, the emergency room was packed with “a tremendous volume of patients.”