Hospital to Reapply for Emergency Status : Health care: Coastal Communities of Santa Ana wants to once again become a paramedic receiving center, bolstering the number of such facilities in the county.

In a move that would help boost the county’s beleaguered emergency-medical system, Coastal Communities Hospital has decided to apply for redesignation as a paramedic receiving center, the status it dropped two years ago because of high levels of uncompensated care.

Hospital officials met Thursday with the Orange County Emergency Medical Services office to set the county application process in motion, Philip L. Herschman, the hospital’s chief executive officer, said Friday. A parallel process at the state level will begin next week.

If upgraded to basic emergency medical service status, Coastal Communities will become the county’s 30th paramedic receiving center and will reverse the recent trend of hospitals abandoning the system.

“I think the entire emergency medical system will welcome them back as a paramedic receiving center,” said program director Betty O’Rourke of Emergency Medical Services, who was at Thursday’s meeting with Coastal Communities officials.

“They certainly have a high volume of patients in that area, and right now the paramedics are having to transport (patients) to other facilities,” she said.

Coastal reduced its status from basic emergency to standby on April 1, 1989, then curtailed all emergency services last June. Officials cited the spiraling costs of uncompensated care and the lack of specialists willing to be on call as backup doctors.

But the elimination of the hospital’s emergency room caused several staff members to seek posts at other hospitals, Herschman said.

“Something we didn’t reckon with was our physicians and nurses leaving to practice their skills somewhere else,” he said. “Good doctors and good nurses like (working with) sick patients, and an emergency room is where you get the acute patients.”

The “vast majority” of the staff supported reinstating emergency services when he announced last month that the hospital would consider reapplying, Herschman said.

As for the high levels of uncompensated care--mostly from indigent patients--Herschman said, “there’s not much you can do about that. Indigent care still comes in on the negative side of the ledger card, but it was balanced by other factors” in the decision to reapply.

Officials hope Coastal’s emergency room can reopen at the end of February, but it will depend on how quickly new doctors can be hired to help staff it, Herschman said.

Coastal’s announcement that it would apply for reinstatement was greeted as welcome news by the medical services Establishment, which has been weakened by several emergency room closures over the last few years.

“We’re very pleased,” said Herbert Rosenzweig, the county’s director of medical services. “They created a big gap when they left the (emergency care) system, and they’re in an area where there is a need for additional access to health care.”

Sue Wyninegar, a spokeswoman at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, where most of Coastal’s emergency patients were taken after its emergency services were cut, called Coastal’s decision “great news.”

“A lot of patients have been going to their emergency room and then end up coming over here afterwards because they can’t get service there,” she said. “It was delaying services to some patients, which wasn’t good.”

However, officials at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana--the only other Santa Ana hospital with basic emergency service status--said the projected opening of Coastal’s emergency room would not affect its patient rolls.

“It’s not going to have that much of an impact on us because we’re looking at a very different patient population,” spokeswoman Margaret Edwards said. “We’re in different locations in the community.”