Passaic’s Lone Hospital May Not Be Enough

By BOB GROVES, STAFF WRITER

St. Mary’s is now the only hospital in Passaic, and Mayor Sammy Rivera wonders if one is enough.

“I don’t think so,” Rivera said. “We used to have three.”

In 2004, two of the city’s three hospitals merged, with Passaic Beth Israel buying the General Hospital Center at Passaic. The two formed PBI Regional Medical Center and shuttered Beth Israel’s downtown campus.

But PBI went bankrupt and, on March 1, St. Mary’s took over PBI’s hospital on Boulevard.

Now St. Mary’s is selling its 100-year-old building on Pennington Avenue, leaving the Boulevard hospital as the only one left to care for the more than 67,000 people who live in Passaic.

“I think it’s way too little for residents,” Rivera said. “Everybody, the surrounding towns, looks to Passaic for health care. Now we find there’s only one hospital.”

Even with two hospitals, Passaic fell short on beds, Rivera said. He found out about the shortage firsthand last month when neither hospital could admit him during a medical emergency.

After waiting several hours for a bed at PBI, “they told me there were 10 patients ahead of me,” he said. There was no room at St. Mary’s either, so he went to Hackensack University Medical Center for care.

The mayor doubts St. Mary’s claims that it can serve the 300,000 residents in and around Passaic. But he wishes the last hospital standing well.

“We’ll wait and see,” Rivera said. “I hope they will succeed.”

Everyone seems to be pulling for Passaic’s remaining hospital, even unionized nurses who complained about staffing following the move this month of patients and employees from the old St. Mary’s into the former PBI.

“I think some things are improving, and some things still need improvement,” said Virginia Treacy, executive director of the nurses’ union, JNESO District Council 1, International Union of Operating Engineers.

“It’s a little better,” Treacy said. “I’m not getting as many staffing complaints on the medical-surgical floors. I think they [management] are trying to fill positions.”

Last fall, PBI laid off 140 employees, many of them aides who distributed food trays, answered phones, transported laboratory samples and moved patients.

“We’ll do whatever we can to help them succeed, without compromising our responsibility to our membership, or our membership’s responsibility to their patients,” Treacy said. “If they don’t succeed, we don’t succeed. It’s a very mutually advantageous relationship.”

St. Mary’s acquired the bankrupt PBI, which owed $60 million, for $36.7 million last fall. But the purchase required a $5 million bridge loan, which was organized by state Health Commissioner Fred M. Jacobs., to keep PBI afloat until the deal was finalized Feb. 28.

“We think that was the right thing to do,” Jacobs said. “The market forced that [merger]. If it was left to the market there’d be no beds in Passaic.”

If both PBI and St. Mary’s had tried to stay open, neither would have survived, and all the employees would have lost their jobs, he said. By combining the two hospitals into the facility with the best physical plant, “now we have a chance of the most financially viable hospital emerging,” Jacobs said.

It is still too early to predict how St. Mary’s will do. “We’ll see next year at this time whether we’re right,” he said.

St. Mary’s move into PBI had a few bumps but went very smoothly overall, considering all the people, policies, procedures and equipment that had to be combined, said Robert Iannaccone, chief operations officer the hospital.

The hospital is planning to handle an estimated 120 emergency department visits per day, or 37,000 a year, he said.

St. Mary’s has reopened its maternity unit, which finances forced it to close last fall, and has delivered several dozen babies this month at the Boulevard hospital, he said.

The hospital operates 270 beds at about 85 percent occupancy, he said. It had $160 million in revenue and $161 million in operating expenses this year, part of that due to the integration with PBI. St. Mary’s projects $200 million in revenue and $197 million in expenses next year.

Psychiatric services and a medical clinic still operating at the old St. Mary’s should be moved to the Boulevard hospital by the end of the year, he said.

“This facility can easily handle the volume” of patients from the Passaic area, Iannaccone said. “The whole community was over- bedded. You had three very inefficient operations. Now you have one very efficient operation.”

The Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth, the nuns who operate St. Mary’s, say their mission to provide good health care to the whole community will continue in the new venue. To symbolize their sincerity, the nuns wheeled the statue of their patron, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, from the old hospital to the lobby of the new St. Mary’s.

“I think everyone has the expectation it’s going to work,” said Clifton Mayor James Anzaldi, who attended the statue’s unveiling. Hospital consolidations are happening all around the United States, and St. Mary’s should be able to handle patients from Passaic and several neighboring municipalities, including Clifton, Anzaldi said.

“I was born here, in the old General Hospital,” said the mayor, who is on the board of St. Mary’s. “It kind of feels like being home in both. Everyone in the community is rooting for success.”

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E-mail: groves@northjersey.com

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