3 Hospitals to Cut Staffs to Match Patient Load

Three major San Gabriel Valley hospitals have announced plans to trim their staffs this year, but hospital administrators say the cutbacks won’t mean longer waits for appointments, surgery or emergency care.

Cutbacks are planned at San Gabriel Valley Medical Center in San Gabriel, Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena and Inter-Community Medical Center in Covina. None will lose doctors or shut down emergency rooms.

Hospital administrators say their staffs are too big for the workload, which is declining. And officials at each hospital said patient care will not be noticeably affected.

“Patient care and providing the staffing for the best patient care is still a top priority,” said Huntington spokeswoman Peg Kean.

However, Maureen Anderson of the California Nurses Assn. questioned whether hospitals could provide the same quality of service with fewer nurses. Nurses already are overworked, said Anderson, spokeswoman for the professional association that represents 26,000 registered nurses.

“Danger signs are missed. Things are miscommunicated,” Anderson said. “Nurses have to triage people as if it were a M.A.S.H. unit. The stress level is through the roof.”

None of the three hospitals’ employees are represented by unions.

Huntington hospital was forced to cut back partially because patient admissions had dropped 6% from last year, Kean said.

In April, the hospital offered an early retirement package to 147 full- and part-time employees. Administrators warned of potential layoffs if the 3,300-member staff is not sufficiently reduced by June 30, the last day the package will be offered.

Last week, San Gabriel Valley Medical Center laid off 17 full-time and 34 part-time employees, almost half of them nurses. The hospital, which has 881 employees, is projecting a $2-million operating loss this year in its $60-million budget.

And last month, Inter-Community Medical Center in Covina cut 50 full-time positions from its 1,100-member staff by offering employees a voluntary separation package.

Nationwide, hospitals are feeling the effects of the recession, said David Langness, a spokesman for the Hospital Council of Southern California. The council, a 240-member trade association, predicts that 10 California hospitals will close within a year.

Experts blame the poor economy, popularity of health maintenance organizations and a decline in patient admissions. As medical science advances, patients are also having shorter hospital stays.

For instance, gall bladder patients used to need a weeklong hospital stay. But because of a new procedure called a laproscopic cholecystectomy, patients need only a one-day hospital stay to recover from gall bladder surgery, said Tom Mone, executive vice president and chief operating officer of San Gabriel Medical Center.

“We had more people than we had work,” Mone said. “When your patient used to be in for four days, and now they’re in for one, you had three days of nurses with nothing to do.”

At the same time it is cutting staff, the hospital is seeking to respond to community needs, he said. On June 21, it will open its first obstetrics unit in 17 years. The unit will include eight single-room maternity suites, two delivery rooms, a neonatal intensive care unit and a nursery.

The hospital had closed its obstetrics unit in the 1970s, when the community was aging and it was no longer profitable to deliver babies. But these days, more people are starting families, Mone said.

“We feel it’s an essential service for a community hospital,” he said. “We need to keep the hospital viable and growing.”