Friends, Staff Shed Tears as Hospital Closes Doors

Santa Paula Memorial Hospital completed its sad journey from bustling medical center to mothball status Friday, welcoming friends who drove all night for a final goodbye and treating the last few walk-up patients before closing its doors and directing new patients to hospitals 20 minutes away in Ventura.

“We’re all crying on the inside,” said nurse Nancy Rudolph, a 10-year employee who treated the last few patients for flu, migraines and chest congestion during an eerily slow morning.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do now; I’m looking for a miracle,” said patient Jenifer Smith, 20, who was curled in pain in the waiting room with a severe headache. “I’m in here all the time.”

“It’s a very sad day,” said Dr. Guillermo Acero, the hospital’s chief pathologist and a staffer for 26 years.

“One, two or three minutes can make all the difference, and I’m pretty sure we’re going to see people dying for lack of a hospital.”

Saddled with nearly $8 million in debt, the small general hospital announced two weeks ago that it would suspend services after 42 years of operation, eliminating about 200 part- and full-time jobs.

But the emergency room closed to trauma patients nine days early because the intensive care unit was understaffed. And the maternity ward closed last week for lack of nurses.

Even as the debt-ridden hospital shut down Friday, Dr. Logan Bundy, director of the emergency room, said he hoped to open a new urgent-care center in downtown Santa Paula within a month to treat at least half of the 15,000 patients who are treated in the hospital’s emergency room each year.

The new facility could assist patients whose injuries and illnesses are not life-threatening, but not those critically injured in auto accidents, heart attack victims or those needing sophisticated X-ray equipment, he said.

“We’re starting negotiations with physicians, nurses, staffing and a landlord, and maybe even a hospital,” Bundy said. Dr. Michelle Daucett, on duty in the limited-care emergency room Friday, said she hoped to be part of Bundy’s new group, which is discussing a possible affiliation with Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura.

Meanwhile, the ambulance company that serves the 50,000 residents of the Santa Clara Valley has doubled from two to four the number of emergency vehicles stationed in Santa Paula and Fillmore to make up for additional travel time.

And county officials said Friday that no one had died because of the extra miles ambulances must now travel.

The Santa Paula trauma center was the only one for 45 miles along busy California 126 between Ventura and Santa Clarita.

Overall, Friday was a day of sadness and anger, of hugs and tears, and of frustration that the beloved hilltop hospital built with community donations in 1961 had not been able to cut a deal with Ventura County’s health-care system to stay open.

“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” Daucett said. “We’ve been crying, and we’ve been hugging.”

Indeed, amid the sadness Friday of leaving jobs and longtime friends was an undercurrent of bitterness.

Veteran general surgeon Mike Sparkuhl, who performed the hospital’s last operation Thursday, said he was feeling resigned that the inevitable had finally occurred.

“But also a little cynicism,” he said, “because it’s always the poor, the politically weak, who get this dumped on them. The hospital’s future is all a big political football right now, and in the meantime, lots of people are going to suffer.”

For example, Sparkuhl said he referred one of his own patients to the Community Memorial emergency room to be examined for chest pains this week. The man waited for hours, then finally walked out, Sparkuhl said.

“I told him last night, ‘You just can’t leave out of frustration. You still need to be seen about your chest pains.’ ”