UCI Medical Will Shut Down Laguna Beach Clinic, Lay Off 23

Citing financial pressures, officials at UCI Medical Center announced Monday that by the end of June they will close the Laguna Beach Community Clinic, a fixture in South County for a quarter-century, and lay off 23 employees who work there.

Known throughout the county for treating indigent patients, many of whom have AIDS, the clinic was acquired by UCI Medical Center in May of last year, after years of wrestling with its own financial difficulties.

“While we are very supportive of the clinic, their board of directors and the Laguna Beach community, operating the clinic no longer fits in with the Medical Center’s long-term strategy,” Mark Laret, the executive director of UCI Medical Center in Orange, said Monday.

The decision to close the Ocean Avenue clinic is part of a “review of all of our service areas to determine how we can best reduce our operating costs and continue providing quality care. Our decision to end our operations at Laguna Beach is part of that effort.”

However, union officials who represent the soon-to-be-laid-off employees said Monday’s announcement, coming after 151 other health-care workers were laid off by UCI in March, confirms their suspicions.

They contend the decision is part of an effort by the UC Board of Regents to more tightly control the future of medical care in its clinics and hospitals statewide and move them closer to privatization.

“UCI is not making this decision,” said Cynthia Hanna, spokeswoman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents most of UCI’s medical employees. “I think the regents want to dump all their medical centers, which, if they do, is going to have a tremendous effect on communities throughout California.”

*

Carl Bloice, spokesman for the California Nurses Assn., called Monday’s announcement “fascinating and disturbing, especially since it comes on the heels of last week’s regents meeting,” in which the regents’ committee on health services moved to privatize major parts of its five-campus hospital system.

Committee members voted to allow UC San Diego Medical Center to seek private partners and make job reductions to eliminate a projected $20-million deficit. They also voted to approve a merger of UC San Francisco’s small managed-care plan with a much larger for-profit managed-care network in the Bay Area. And they discussed but did not vote on a landmark merger that would privatize the UC San Francisco Medical Center, regarded by many as the UC hospital system’s crown jewel, and merge it with the private Stanford University Medical Center.

Bloice contends that privatization undermines the quality of care for the poor and tends to embrace a system “of checkbook medicine, which means bottom-line health care. In that kind of system, it’s the poor who get shunted out--and onto a public health-care system that is already collapsing.”

Laret, however, denied the regents’ influence in his making the decision to shut down the clinic in Laguna, saying the board wants nothing more than to see its “hospitals and medical centers operate in a fiscally sound way.”

He noted that UCI Medical Center received $35 million from one state program a year ago, only to see that amount reduced to $11.5 million this year. As a result, he said, UCI Medical Center is anticipating its own operating loss this year of more than $8 million.

For these reasons and others, he sees the trend toward privatization as a good one.

“Partnering our academic medical centers with strong, high-quality community providers is the road to success in academic medicine in the future,” Laret said. “The old model of being independent is an anachronism.”

Laret attempted to allay the fears of community members in Laguna Beach, saying the clinics’ patients--including its population of AIDS patients--will continue to receive treatment in other UCI facilities, even if it means carrying them by shuttle to Orange or Santa Ana.

He also hopes another provider will step in and assume control of the clinic, with the most optimistic hope being no disruption in service.

The clinic’s staff--23 full- and part-time workers--was notified Monday they will be laid off June 30. Laret said officials will try to place as many employees as possible in other Medical Center jobs.