Santa Teresita Decides to Keep Full Emergency Room Services

The emergency room at Santa Teresita Hospital will remain open to all patients, its board of directors decided this week.

The hospital had warned it might stop accepting patients brought to the emergency room in ambulances unless state and county officials approved a plan to convert 23 hospital beds to more profitable use in an affiliated nursing home.

Expect Acceptance

Hospital officials are now convinced that the plan will be accepted by all the licensing agencies. Approval has been received from one county and one state agency. That will allow Santa Teresita to begin making necessary changes, including construction of four restrooms and a dining room in the nursing home next to the hospital.

Once the additions are completed, final approval must be received from the county Health Services Department.

The 283-bed hospital proposed the bed conversion plan last year to help subsidize its financially ailing emergency room, said Executive Vice President Mike Costello.

In 1987, Santa Teresita lost $400,000 in operating costs for the emergency facility, which receives 1,000 patients a month from eight cities. Losses climbed to $600,000 last year. The losses were blamed on an increase in patients without insurance, insufficient reimbursement from state insurance programs for the poor and rising costs.

The hospital never planned to totally close its emergency room. Walk-in patients or those arriving by ambulances without paramedics on board would have been admitted.

After “a long bureaucratic stalemate,” Costello said the Los Angeles Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development has approved architectural changes required by the county Health Services Department. The health services department has also approved the plan, but will not decide whether to issue a license until after the additions are made.

Unusually Long Wait

County officials had said that it is unusual to take so long to act on this kind of application, which was made in August. Robert Carp, program manager of acute ancillary services for the health services department, said he did not know the reason for the delay.

The 23 hospital beds have not been used recently because of a lack of personnel. Costello said the beds can be used in the nursing home because that facility is not required to be as intensively staffed.

If the license is granted, the nursing home will have 156 beds. The additional 23 beds would raise an estimated $800,000 a year, which could be used to offset emergency room losses, hospital officials said.

Costello said a community task force formed in February to save the emergency room had helped to speed up the application process by contacting state and county officials. The group included representatives from the hospital, county Supervisor Pete Schabarum, state Sen. Newton Russell (R-Glendale), Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy (R-Arcadia), and city officials from Duarte, Monrovia and Bradbury.