Saving San Leandro Hospital 3: Focus Shifts to Board of Supervisors

-
Last night, the Eden Township Healthcare District board cast a non-binding vote in opposition to the proposal by Alameda County Medical Center and Sutter to relocate acute rehabilitation care from Fairmont Hospital to San Leandro Hospital and end emergency room service at San Leandro Hospital.

This occurred after Sutter announced earlier in the day that it was assigning its purchase rights under its contract with the Eden Township Healthcare District to operate San Leandro Hospital to the Alameda County Medical Center. Sutter also stated it would be exercising its right to give 90 days notice of termination of operation of service at San Leandro Hospital within the next 30 days.

To maintain emergency care at San Leandro Hospital it is critical that (a) the Eden Township District carefully review the offer from Prime Healthcare to takeover operations at San Leandro Hospital and (b) the Alameda County Board of Supervisors direct the Alameda County Medical Center rescind its offer to Sutter.

Fairmont Hospital should be retrofitted, not relocated to San Leandro Hospital. For an analysis of Prime Healthcare's offer, see the report by the Camden Group.

What message should we convey to the Board of Supervisors? Carole Rogers, a member of the Eden Township Healthcare District board, wrote the following today on the Yahoo Discussion Group Save San Leandro Hospital:

1. We (the Board members) have just been informed that Sutter Health believes it has the legal right to bypass the District and assign their lease to the County. Disputes call for binding arbitration, which is costly and time consuming. The District Directors have gone on record that they are against this transition.

2. PrimeHealth Care Inc. is a viable option and they have promised to keep San Leandro Hospital open as an acute care facility with a 24/7 Emergency Room. The District is in negotiations with PrimeHealth; and financed a Due Diligence report at a cost of $35,000. (CamdenGroup, attached)

3. Senator Corbett is working on obtaining a reprieve/postponmen t for Fairmont Hospital from its legal mandate to rebuild. Senator Corbett has stated on several occasions that the State Legislature is not going to shut down hundreds of hospitals in this state because they cannot afford to bring their buildings up to seismic codes - especially in this economic climate.

4. PrimeHealth has agreed to look at the feasibility of opening acute rehabilitation beds on the fourth floor of San Leandro Hospital (now vacant.) We are hoping to stipulate this in our negotiations for their proposal to lease/acquire San Leandro Hospital.
This is the link to their most current proposal: http://www.ethd. org/SitePDFs/ Prime%20Healthca re%20Proposal% 20May%2029, %202009.pdf

5. If San Leandro Hospital closes, most all of the private doctors who have offices near the hospital will move out of the community. Doctors want their offices near the hospital.

6. 80% of all SLH emergency room visits are "Urgent" not "Emergency." This statistic is true for any hospital, not just SLH.

7. 70% of SLH inpatients live in the Eden Township District. There will not be enough acute care beds or emergency room beds to assimilate between the local hospitals should SLH close.

8. Closing San Leandro Hospital Emergency Department will cost lives. Minutes count, and San Leandro residents have experienced this. The SL City Manager (Steve Hollister) asked the County Fire Chief in my presence on day, if he had a heart attack (he lives near the hospital) - would it make a difference if he were taken to San Leandro or Eden Emergency. You know the answer - (seconds count in a heart attack.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Looking Back: Measure B Transformed San Leandro Public Schools

-
Image
Our tax dollars can make a real difference in the lives of our children and prosperity of a community. Twelve years ago San Leandro High School was grossly overcrowded leading to discipline problems and undermining academic performance, no theater in the school district existed for student performances, and many restrooms at schools were in such poor condition that the students would not use them. That all changed in August 2006 when the School Board voted to place Measure  B on the ballot. The largest school construction bond in San Leandro’s history, Measure B received overwhelming support and led to the physical transformation of San Leandro public school (combined with the passage of two subsequent bond measures and one earlier measure). With better public schools, San Leandro has become a more desirable city to live, helping attract and retain families who previously would have never moved to San Leandro or moved away when the children were in middle school. Here ...
Read more

San Leandro's Unsustainable City Budget

-
Yesterday, I attended a meeting of the San Leandro City Council Finance Committee. The committee consists of Mayor Santos and Councilmembers Prola and Gregory. Gregory was absent. In short, if significant action is not taken, the city will burn through all of its reserves, including eventually reserves for natural disasters and other emergencies. By 2015, San Leandro could join the City of Vallejo in declaring bankruptcy. Summary of Finance Committee Presentation Perry Carter, the Interim Finance Director, gave an update on the budget. In analyzing a budget, you need to examine at least three years of data - the previous, current and next fiscal years. Carter first reported on the "preliminary actual" numbers for the fiscal year which just ended on June 30, 2009. Illustrating how quickly the city finances collapsed last year, the original city budget for fiscal year 2008-09 assumed $76.2 million (hereafter simply "M") in revenues and $81.6 M in expenditures. ...
Read more

How Juan Gonzalez won the San Leandro Mayor's office at the end of the counting of votes

-
Image
On November 18, 2022, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters released the vote count for nearly all votes cast in the November 2022 general election. After being behind for the entire vote count, Juan Gonzalez effectively won the race.  How did this happen? First, from election night through 11/17, the Registrar had reported a total of 13,746 first choice ballots in the Mayor's race. On 11/18, the number of votes reported increased by 6,436 to 20,185 total votes. That was a nearly 47% jump in the reported votes. Another way of looking at the data is that prior to 11/18, all previous vote counts released by the Registrar did not include roughly one-third of the votes that were cast in the race. Second, Gonzalez  decisively took the lead in the the first choice ballots that were released by the Registrar on 11/18. Gonzalez took these votes by 39% to 33% margin. With the exception of the first vote count released by the Registrar on election night right after the polls closed wh...
Read more