Humana Hospital in Westminster Will Close Sunday : Health care: The facility has been sold and will be converted to a center for those needing ventilators. The mayor vows to try to restore services.

Humana Hospital-Westminster will close Sunday, raising concerns about the diminished availability of emergency care in the city, which will be left without a hospital within its boundaries.

The hospital, which has provided traditional services for 35 years, is being sold to Vencor Inc. and will be converted into a facility for critical care patients referred from other county hospitals who need to be kept on ventilators. The deal is expected to close escrow Thursday.

“It is something that borders on near disaster for the city of Westminster,” contends Mayor Charles V. Smith, who said he did not learn of the pending sale of the hospital until it was “too late” to intervene.

All Humana-Westminster patients have been discharged or transferred to other facilities, and the 413-member staff has disbanded.

The hospital’s demise is indicative of the trend for consolidation of health care facilities in the county, which has been caught with a surplus of hospital beds in an era of cost controls aimed at reducing hospital stays and promoting outpatient care.

Humana officials acknowledge that in the stiff competition for patients, their Westminster hospital was unable to negotiate ties with fast-growing managed care insurance programs, which send their members to other hospitals in the area.

Humana Inc. spokesman Ed Kanis said Friday that the Louisville, Ky., hospital chain is also negotiating a possible sale of nearby Humana Hospital-Huntington Beach to St. Joseph Health System in Orange. The Huntington Beach facility is likewise suffering financially from a shortage of managed-care contracts, he said.

Two years ago, yet another hospital in the same crowded market area, Midwood Community Hospital, closed and was converted to a psychiatric hospital. That hospital failed earlier this year.

Although Humana Hospital-Westminster had been losing business for five years--filling only about 30 of its 182 beds in its last months of operation--its emergency room nonetheless continued as one of the busiest in the county, providing care to more than 1,300 patients a month.

Before it shut down Nov. 1, the emergency room was treating an average of 168 patients a month who had been taken there by paramedics. It was the fifth busiest of the 28 paramedic receiving centers in the county, according to Betty O’Rourke, the county’s director of emergency services.

In addition, the hospital was designated a neurological receiving center in the countywide emergency system, treating 20 patients with spinal and head injuries each month.

Neurological emergency patients are now being sent to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, UCI Medical Center in Orange or Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, O’Rourke said

Other emergency patients in Westminster’s former service area--which extended into parts of Garden Grove, Stanton, Huntington Beach and Cypress--are being sent to Humana Hospital-Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos Medical Center and AMI Medical Center of Garden Grove.

“These hospitals are about five miles farther away, adding a minimum of 15 minutes to each call,” said Craig Campbell, spokesman for the Westminster Fire Department, which operates two paramedic units. “For some kinds of injuries, that 15 minutes can be the difference between life and death.”

Campbell said that those longer distances also increase the chances that Westminster’s paramedics may be tied up when a new emergency arises, therefore requiring assistance from paramedics in surrounding cities.

The Westminster hospital, which is in a blue-collar neighborhood with a large elderly population, also received considerable walk-in business.

In addition, the hospital also served the routine medical needs of a large poor population that had no medical insurance or received assistance from the state Medi-Cal program or the county program for the indigent.

“We had the second-busiest emergency room in Orange County for indigent patients--second only to UCI Medical Center,” said Liz Barton, the hospital’s marketing director.

Dr. Roland Heidenhofer, former vice chief of the emergency room, said he had seen a sharp increase in the number of poor patients in the past two years. More than 50% of the care provided in the emergency room was not reimbursed or poorly reimbursed by government programs, he said. These patients, he said, generally could not find private physicians willing to care for them.

“We had a reputation of not turning anyone away, no matter what their insurance status, while a lot of other hospitals would hassle them,” said Dr. Francois Martin, another emergency room doctor at Westminster.

Martin said Westminster residents will have to travel farther and may have to wait longer to be treated at neighboring hospitals, which themselves are reporting increased demands on their emergency rooms.

The closing of the hospital worries some Westminster residents, particularly the elderly and those with heart conditions, who depend on emergency services, local doctors said.

“My patients are scared to death,” said Dr. Rifat Rifat, a family physician with an office next to the hospital. “They are perceiving that health care will be harder to access.”

Smith vowed that the city will do “everything within our legal means to reopen that facility,” even if only the emergency room and outpatient surgery services are restored.

Smith said he hopes to negotiate with Vencor to establish such a limited operation in a portion of the facility. One possibility, Smith said, would be for Vencor to lease space to another hospital that is familiar with running an emergency room.

However, Richard Butler, administrator of Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, said the idea of creating a “stand-alone” emergency room probably would prove to be financially unfeasible and prohibited by state and county regulations that “require backup services (of a hospital) to meet the needs of the patients.”

Mark Meyers, chief executive of AMI Garden Grove, said that hospital, which already has absorbed much of Westminster’s business, plans before the end of the year to open an urgent-care center in Westminster.