Later this month, Palo Verde Hospital in Blythe will open its doors to the public for an ice cream social where residents can take a break from the summer heat and meet with hospital leadership.
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“This is a perfect opportunity for the community to come in to speak to the leaders, see the staff, and I know the community has a lot of questions,” Joanna Gonzalez, board clerk for the Palo Verde Healthcare District (PVHD), said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “This is a perfect opportunity for them to ask their questions.”
The event will also feature tours of the hospital to showcase improvements to the facility, including the newly remodeled cafeteria and updated lobbies and patient rooms. There will also be a resource fair highlighting other services available to community members.
Set to take place July 30 at the hospital from 5:30-7:30 p.m., the open house will also give the community a chance to see firsthand how the hospital has changed since Riverside University Health System (RUHS) temporarily took over the day-to-day operations of the hospital in February.
“It’s very emotional to see all the support, all the collaboration and the teamwork,” Gonzalez said of the hospital’s transformation. “It’s almost overwhelming at times that we’ve all come together to save this hospital.”
Last May, the five-member board tasked with overseeing the rural hospital announced the facility would be suspending patient admissions for the “foreseeable future” due to a cascading series of events that had depleted the PVHD’s reserves.
The situation was made more dire by the fact that Palo Verde Hospital is the only hospital serving the Palo Verde Valley, with the closest California-based hospital more than 90 miles away. The closer hospital, 50 miles away in Parker, Arizona, does not accept many of the health insurance plans used by those in the area.
By October, the board filed for bankruptcy in hopes that it would provide a way for the hospital’s emergency room and community clinic to remain open.
“The bankruptcy filing is an effort by the district to keep the hospital open,” bankruptcy attorney Ed Hays, partner at Marshack Hays Wood LLP, said at the meeting. “The bankruptcy gives the district an opportunity to try to reorganize its finances and its debts that it owes to various different creditors.”
With a tentative plan in place, and additional assistance, the situation seemed to be improving at the end of December. But after the state rejected the board’s attempt to participate in a funding program using proceeds from a private loan, the hospital’s financial situation spiraled.
By January, the hospital was operating with just a few days of cash on hand, requiring immediate financial assistance from both the city of Blythe and Riverside County.
As a stipulation of the county’s financial assistance, which later included an additional $3.45 million loan, the hospital’s board had to allow RUHS staff to take over management and clinical services, hospital leadership, staffing support and other related services.
“We’ve looked at a lot of the things that we had to address, whether it was staffing, supplies or facilities, and we have kind of standardized systems for doing a lot of this [work] at RUHS,” Michelle DeArmond, Palo Verde Hospital’s interim executive director, said in an interview with The Record. “And we’ve been able to walk through all of these different areas of need, focus on them and try to find different improvements.”
DeArmond, who is an executive director for RUHS, said the first task was to really dig into the hospital’s operations and finances in order to figure out not only what needed to be done, but also in what order. Thursday marked 150 days since RUHS came in, and the leadership team said there has been a complete turnaround at the hospital.
“They didn’t even have the basics in order to really provide the care they wanted out there, so that was the first thing we did,” Leah Patterson, chief nursing officer for RUHS and interim chief nursing officer at Palo Verde Hospital, said. “Then we started branching out and looking at what other things we were going to start needing to support the organization and to be able to, once we stabilize it, sustain it.”
Now, the hospital is able to provide additional outpatient care via its emergency room and community clinic with the support of the pharmacy, laboratory, radiology and cardiopulmonary departments.
“We’ve brought in some updated newer equipment for them or equipment they didn’t have,” said Lisa Mackie, clinical director of emergency services at RUHS and interim emergency department director at Palo Verde Hospital. “We’ve brought in some critical care equipment, airway equipment, equipment that looks at different areas of the heart, an electrocardiogram. We’ve stabilized their supplies and their supply line.”
Mackie said the community was really starting to see that investment in the hospital, which also included additional support for the staff.
“If I go to the grocery store or to the Starbucks or to a restaurant, I basically can’t go out anywhere in the community without somebody coming to me,” she said. “I mean, hugs, grabbing my hand, saying thank you, telling me stories about how the emergency department has a new face.”
Patterson, who is staying at a Kampgrounds of America (KOA) property in Ehrenberg, Arizona, said the facility’s managers called her one day asking if they could send a very ill camper to Palo Verde Hospital for care.
“I said, ‘Absolutely, bring them in,’” she said. “Our [emergency room] doctors, of course, provided incredible care, and then after that, we discharged them, and they went back.”
She later got another call from the KOA management saying they were so excited to be able to refer people in need of medical care to an actual healthcare facility instead of the local fire department.
“Being able to supply that, it just gives us goosebumps,” Patterson said. “It’s a lot of work, but man has it been worth it.”
As for what comes after the 180-day management services agreement expires next month, DeArmond said she didn’t know.
According to budget documents provided to The Record, the hospital is set to bring in just shy of $15 million while spending about $24 million this fiscal year. With the addition of roughly $1.9 million in loan forgiveness and one-time AB 103 funding of $3 million, the hospital is set to end the fiscal year with a deficit of roughly $4.6 million.
“I will tell you quite transparently: We don’t have a plan in front of us,” she said, noting that the supervisors and the PVHD board will have some decisions to make in the coming weeks. “There is a plan that the leadership is working on and assembling, and we’ll be doing so right up until the end of that [agreement].”
One thing the RUHS leadership team could say for certain was that everyone working to stabilize the hospital understands the importance of keeping the doors open.
“This community needs a hospital, needs an emergency department,” Mackie said. “One of the most imperative aspects that rural hospitals, critical access hospitals, provide to the community is the ability to stabilize them, to treat them and hopefully discharge them home back to their families, and, if not, get them transferred to a specialty tertiary center where they can continue to get the care, and without that, that’s a concern for the community.”
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