Tenet to Close Hospital in Marina del Rey

Tenet Healthcare Corp. said Wednesday that it will close Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital, just six months after acquiring the Marina del Rey facility from a Catholic hospital chain.

The closure of the 166-bed hospital and its emergency room--by August at the latest--will add to the burden on nearby ERs, county officials said. Nearly all of the county’s 80 remaining emergency rooms are crowded, and patients often are forced to wait hours before they are seen by a doctor.

But Tenet officials said they would keep Daniel Freeman Memorial, the main 358-bed campus in Inglewood, open, and are seeking to expand urgent-care services at a clinic at Los Angeles International Airport.

Daniel Freeman Marina’s closure is the second hospital shut by Tenet in Los Angeles County this year. In January, Tenet announced it would close St. Luke Medical Center in Pasadena, along with its emergency room, citing financial problems. St. Luke had 165 beds and 442 full- and part-time employees.

“The net effect will be additional waits and longer transfer times for paramedics,” said Virginia Hastings, director of the Emergency Medical Services Agency at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

Hastings acknowledged, though, that Daniel Freeman Memorial is far more important to the county’s emergency network than the Marina campus.

“We recognize that all these hospitals are not going to stay open,” she said. “For us, it becomes a game of prioritizing.”

Daniel Freeman Marina handled about 4,400 ambulance runs in 2001. In the future, patients will have to be taken to five neighboring hospitals, Daniel Freeman Chief Executive Harris Koenig said.

Tenet, based in Santa Barbara, plans to put the Marina facility up for sale in the next few days. At the same time, the firm will try to find jobs within the Tenet system for the hospital’s 350 employees or help them find work elsewhere, Koenig said.

Tenet acquired the two Daniel Freeman hospitals in December for $55 million from Carondelet Health System, based in St. Louis. The two hospitals were losing $23 million a year, Koenig said, and the Marina hospital treated only 40 acute-care patients per day.

“This hospital has not been as successful as a lot of people would like for it to be or thought it might be,” Koenig said. “There are not enough patients now, and there won’t be enough patients in the future to allow us to afford or attract the capital to do the necessary upgrading of this hospital.”

Consumer advocates who fought Tenet’s acquisition of Daniel Freeman said the hospital chain has done exactly what they feared--close the Marina hospital to sell the valuable land beneath it.

“The other shoe drops,” said Maura Kealey, a health-care coordinator with the Service Employees International Union, upon learning of Marina’s closure.

“Marina hospital, while it’s small, has an emergency room that is vital-- vital to the people living in Marina del Rey, in Venice,” said Kealey, whose union has frequently locked horns with Tenet. The union fought to block the sale but does not represent Daniel Freeman employees.

“Under the previous owners as a nonprofit, Marina was one of the few places where the poor working people in Venice could go for care,” Kealey said. “This is a major loss for them.”

In approving the sale of the Daniel Freeman hospitals, California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer required that Tenet operate the emergency room at the larger Daniel Freeman campus in Inglewood for five years and maintain the ER at Centinela Hospital Medical Center, which it already owned, for the same period.

Tenet is spending $7 million to enhance the Inglewood facility, and has no plans to close it, even after its five-year obligation ends, Koenig said.

The attorney general did not require Tenet to keep the Marina campus open. Tenet is required, however, to provide Marina-area patients with transportation to other facilities until June 2005 to ensure that they have continued access to health services, said Sandra Michioku, the attorney general’s spokeswoman. Details on how that would work were not released Wednesday.

“We’re obviously disappointed about the closure,” Michioku said. “The concerns about possible closure did prompt us in our review to require that residents in the area would continue to have access to health facilities.”

Meanwhile, Tenet also said Wednesday that it is working with the county Emergency Medical Services Agency to begin accepting some ambulance patients in stable condition at the Centinela Airport Medical Clinic at LAX. If a final agreement is reached, the airport facility would be the only urgent-care center in the county licensed to accept 911 patients.

If patients needed additional medical treatment in a hospital, they would be transferred to the Daniel Freeman hospital in Inglewood or Centinela Medical Center.

Hastings said the airport facility would not play a major role in the county’s emergency network because it would only be able to receive ambulances carrying patients with minor, non-life-threatening injuries or illnesses. These conditions include minor cuts, broken bones, nausea and diarrhea.

“We don’t expect 911 to be using it very much because these patients are so minor that often they’re not transported,” Hastings said, adding that she envisions only five patients a day being taken by ambulance to the airport clinic.

But Koenig said the urgent-care facility could help alleviate some congestion at emergency rooms. The clinic, opened in late 1986, sees nearly 25,000 patients a year, but has the capacity for double that.