Columbia May Revive Westlake Medical Center

America’s two largest hospital chains are gearing up for a battle royal in the Westlake area, each scrambling to tap a market left wide open when the Westlake Medical Center closed in 1996.

The country’s biggest chain, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., may reopen the vacant Westlake Medical Center, possibly turning it into a 24-hour urgent-care center or a women’s hospital, officials said.

The move--a dramatic reversal of the company’s earlier decision to close the facility because it wasn’t making money--would follow a $6-million emergency-room expansion planned for Columbia’s Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks by late 1999, said hospital spokeswoman Kris Carraway-Bowman.

At the same time, America’s second-largest chain, Tenet Healthcare Corp. of Santa Barbara, is planning to open its own urgent-care center less than two miles away from the closed hospital, according to spokesman Brandon Edwards.

The Tenet urgent-care center at 971 Westlake Blvd. will be open by late April, and its staff will include at least two physicians.

“We’ll go forward with our plans and wait to see what Columbia does,” Edwards said Thursday. “That’s their business. This is ours. We’ll wait to see how it shakes out.”

Edwards said Tenet may consider opening another full-service hospital in the area.

“Apart from the urgent-care center, the corporation is also looking for land to develop a surgery center and possibly an out-patient service facility,” he said. “Those two would be the precursors for the development of a hospital, if the demand warrants.”

A few years ago, Westlake Village residents and city officials fumed that Columbia had left them out in the cold by closing the medical center.

“I’m delighted. Can I take credit for this?” said Thousand Oaks resident Alan Greenbaum, a persistent critic of the closure of Westlake Medical Center.

“This is only good news for residents. The Conejo Valley is growing by leaps and bounds, and we not only need to keep up with it, but we should be ahead of it in terms of providing health care,” Greenbaum said.

Bill Nolan, associate administrator at Los Robles, said the decision to examine reopening the Westlake Medical Center is not in response to any immediate plans by Tenet. But he acknowledged there are strong public feelings about closure of Westlake Medical Center.

“There certainly is community sentiment for doing something there,” he said.

If Columbia does reopen the 126-bed Westlake Village site, at 4415 Lakeview Canyon Road, the company would reverse its previous stance. Columbia bought the 20-acre site in 1995 and promised not to make any major changes. However, officials shut the facility a year later, saying that Los Robles Regional Medical Center was equipped to absorb new patients from the Westlake Village area.

Now, Nolan said, Los Robles is finding itself at capacity, and opening a new medical facility in Westlake Village could help lessen the load, Nolan said.

Columbia currently operates hospitals in Thousand Oaks and West Hills, in the northwest San Fernando Valley, along with Los Robles Medical Center’s East Campus facility at 150 Via Merida in Thousand Oaks. The East Campus site--previously operated independently as Charter Hospital--includes a 46-bed transitional care center, an 11-bed acute-injury rehabilitation facility and a 19-bed geriatric psychiatry unit.

“We’re trying to find the best way to utilize our three facilities” in and around Thousand Oaks, Nolan said.

After Westlake Medical Center closed, a private cancer-treatment facility, run by Salick Health Care Inc. of Los Angeles, briefly operated at the site. Salick shut it in August after determining it was not making a profit.

Carraway-Bowman said the vacant, one-story medical center--with its Spanish adobe-style architecture and red-tiled roof--would be an ideal site for a 24-hour urgent-care center operating in conjunction with the Los Robles emergency room, a women’s or children’s hospital, or maybe an out-patient diagnostic center.

Columbia has hired a consulting firm to survey local residents about their health-care needs. A team of pollsters was in Westlake Village and surrounding communities this week.

The report from the firm should be available by mid-March, at which time hospital officials will brainstorm possible uses for the building, Carraway-Bowman said.

Dr. Richard Benedon, a Los Robles emergency-room doctor, said he would prefer Columbia to open something like a women’s hospital at the Westlake Village site rather than an urgent-care facility.

“In my mind, we already take care of that need here at Los Robles,” he said.

Benedon and other doctors lobbied administrators for the emergency-room expansion based on a rising number of patients, and the top bosses agreed.

“They were very receptive,” Benedon said. “I think for some members of the emergency room staff it seems like a faraway pipe dream, but for us who worked on it, it’s exciting.”

The expansion--the first new construction at Los Robles in 30 years--will about triple the emergency room’s size, from 3,671 square feet to about 11,000.

Officials plan to increase the waiting room from 264 square feet to 1,400, Carraway-Bowman said, and new rooms will be added to care for patients suffering from minor to major injuries or ailments.

Carraway-Bowman said emergency patients are always seen immediately, but that the expansion will help nurses and doctors attend to other patients who may otherwise have been forced to wait.

The expansion includes:

* Addition of 15 new beds in the emergency room, for a total of 26.

* Four new “fast-track” examination rooms for a total of seven. These rooms are for nonemergency patients, like those who come in on the weekend with a severely swollen throat, Carraway-Bowman said.

* A second cardiac-care room. “That’s important, especially with our aging population,” Carraway-Bowman said.

* An additional holding room for combative or psychiatric patients.

* Five new observation rooms for patients whose conditions are too serious for normal hospital rooms, but not serious enough for the intensive care unit.

* A new isolation unit for highly contagious patients.

Columbia approved the expansion plan last month, and Los Robles is just beginning the preliminary stages of the project.

After the hospital gets its paperwork in order, the state will need to approve the project before it can proceed. Officials hope to break ground on the expansion by November, with a 12-month construction period planned, Carraway-Bowman said.