Calexico’s Only Hospital Recertified : Health: Approval for Medi-Cal and Medicare cases averts closure. State had cited facility for numerous violations.

Calexico Hospital, the only hospital in the impoverished Imperial Valley border town of 20,000, has been given a new lease on life after four months on the critical list.

Or, as the Calexico Chronicle put it in a front-page banner headline Thursday: “HOSPITAL RECOVERS: Tumor Non-Malignant.”

State health inspectors this week informed Calexico Hospital officials that the 34-bed public facility with a checkered past has cleaned up its many health violations and can resume treating Medi-Cal and Medicare patients.

“I think we’ve learned our lesson about not letting some of these things go so long,” said Dr. Amalia Katsigeanis, the general practitioner and surgeon who has been the hospital’s medical mainstay for three decades.

After the hospital failed repeated inspections in the final eight months of 1992, trustees in January voluntarily surrendered the hospital’s Medi-Cal and Medicare certification.

Since the majority of the hospital’s patients are poor and elderly people who are dependent on Medi-Cal and Medicare, lack of certification left the facility on the verge of closure. For much of the past four months, the hospital has been without a single patient.

Some employees were laid off, the intensive care unit was closed and the emergency room was restricted only to those patients who were too seriously injured to be sent to a hospital 12 miles away in El Centro.

After the state’s first unannounced inspection last April, the document listing the hospital’s deficiencies was thicker than the phone directory of a medium-size city. Among the hospital’s many problems were a chaotic management style, lack of medical oversight procedures, broken equipment, cockroaches, a sagging roof and nurses without proper licenses.

A follow-up inspection last month found the hospital, at long last, close to meeting the state’s minimum standards. Once concerns about the roof and the laboratory were satisfied, the state notified the federal government that the hospital was eligible to return to the Medi-Cal and Medicare programs.

“All and all, things look pretty good,” said Nelsen Ford, a supervisor with the state Department of Health Services’ regional office in San Diego.

If the hospital had failed to regain its certification, it would have suffered the shame of being only the third of California’s 556 hospitals to be booted from the Medi-Cal and Medicare programs in the past two years.

Board members swear they will never again let the hospital get as run down as it was last year.

“We’re not going to let anyone slack off, including ourselves,” said hospital board member Hildy Carrillo-Rivera, who is also managing editor of the Calexico Chronicle. “We worked too hard to let people get comfortable and have things go back to the way they were.”

As part of the civic celebration, a banner is planned for the hospital entryway: “We Did It.”

Carrillo-Rivera said she prefers a banner that read “See, You Thought We Couldn’t Do It.”