El Dorado Hospital to Become Elderly Health-Care Center
By Jane Erikson, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson
May 26–El Dorado Hospital will no longer be a hospital after this year, but will be made into another kind of health-care center — likely a nursing home and other services for the elderly.
El Dorado’s staff and patients will move to Tucson Medical Center over the next seven months, TMC officials said Thursday.
No jobs will be lost, they said, but Tucson will have one less emergency room, which could make it harder for patients to get timely care in other ERs.
Both hospitals are part of the TMC HealthCare group that purchased El Dorado for about $32 million in December 2003.
TMC HealthCare’s board of directors voted Wednesday to consolidate the two hospitals. The board hopes by September to review options for the future of the El Dorado campus at 1400 N. Wilmot Road.
“The board said there is an asset there that can be redirected . . . to better serve the community,” TMC CEO Frank Alvarez said Thursday.
Reaction to the announcement ranged from enthusiastic to skeptical, with questions raised about the ability of other hospitals to handle the 16,000 emergency patients El Dorado sees each year.
“It means that all of us will be impacted by those patients, who will still require care,” said Eileen Whalen, the University Medical Center vice president who oversees that hospital’s ER and trauma center.
Staffing may not be a problem, Whalen said, “but in terms of patients’ waiting times, we may all be impacted. It may hamper our ability to get patients through in a timely manner — and our waiting times now are excessive.”
TMC has already begun revamping its ER procedures, which should make it easier for that hospital to absorb many of those who would have gone to El Dorado two miles away, Alvarez said.
TMC is licensed for more than 600 beds but because of the shortage of nurses and other hospital workers — here and across the country — has only 450 beds in use, Alvarez said.
TMC plans to open 70 more beds to accommodate the 50 or 60 patients hospitalized each day at El Dorado, he said.
TMC HealthCare is moving ahead with plans to build a 100-bed Rincon Community Hospital at Civano, at South Houghton and East Drexel roads, to open in about two years. And it intends to rebuild TMC, at 5301 E. Grant Road, replacing its sprawling one-story design with a seven-story bed tower and other structures to open in 2012.
Those projects are expected to cost about $400 million, leading the parent organization to look for ways to economize. Consolidating the two existing hospitals is a way to reduce current costs and “work smarter,” said TMC spokeswoman Julia Strange.
The new El Dorado is likely to include an expanded version of its well-respected Generations psychiatric program for seniors, a nursing home, and an urgent-care center for seniors, TMC officials said.
With the nation’s 78 million baby boomers beginning to enter their retirement years, health-care organizations around the country are looking for ways to meet their growing needs, said Richard Rodriguez, TMC’s chief medical officer.
Marian Lupu, director of the Pima Council on Aging, said she was pleasantly surprised to learn of TMC’s vision for El Dorado.
“I’m excited to think there could be a whole facility to meet the needs of the baby boomers who are growing older,” Lupu said.
TMC Senior Vice President Jack Jewett said he will talk with Lupu and other community leaders to get their advice for the new center.
Dr. Greg Pennock, El Dorado’s chief of staff, said he was “not comfortable” with how El Dorado’s doctors had only limited discussion with TMC HealthCare directors before they decided the fate of the 28-year-old hospital.
But Pennock said he considers the move to consolidate “a reasonable decision from a business standpoint.”
“I only hope the TMC board has thought about the decision as part of a longer-term, regional health-care plan,” he said. “That’s one thing that’s needed in this community, a higher level of planning.”
Barbara Smith, administrator of Saguaro Physicians, a doctors’ group next door to El Dorado, said the hospital has been “an anchor to the community.”
“But at the same time I and all the physicians that I have worked with for 18 years here understand the economics of health care, and we know this will be a better utilization of scarce resources,” Smith said.
—–
Copyright (c) 2006, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.
LSE:SOR,