Op-Ed by Mark Friedman – Printed in San Franciso Chronicle – November 21, 2024
Maria Amaya was born at St. Rose Hospital in Hayward as was her daughter, Alicia, age 7, who is treated for asthma at St. Rose, which is five minutes from their house. At a recent hearing about St. Rose’s future, Maria told the dramatic story of how both her parents were having extreme difficulty breathing due to Covid during the height of the pandemic. She rushed them to St. Rose where doctors found that their lungs had collapsed. They needed to be intubated for two months and their lives were saved. If they had to travel 30 minutes or an hour to another hospital, it’s likely they would have died.
The Amayas are among 30,000 patients annually, including thousands of low-income families, who depend on the vital lifeline of St. Rose. Once operated by an out-of-state order of nuns, St. Rose has been an independent non-profit hospital since the 2000s. That makes it an endangered species. In the past 10 years, 20 hospitals have closed in California. Rural and smaller stand-alone hospitals like St. Rose are most at risk.
Desperate community efforts to save those local hospitals have often ended in disappointment and frustration.
But with the recent announcement that St. Rose Hospital is being acquired by Alameda Health System, the Amaya family and so many others know that their beloved hospital including the emergency room, cardiac/cath lab, and sparkling new 27-bed sub-acute unit will be there for them for the foreseeable future.
How did Hayward and Alameda County buck the trend of small independent hospital closures?
It took a community that refused to give in to despair, along with exceptional leadership and coordination from non-profit organizations, elected and appointed government officials, and effective collaboration and support from the regional health care community.
The Covid pandemic was a blow to hospitals which lost revenue from fewer patients and surgeries; increased costs for protective equipment and safety protocols; stressed doctors and nurses; and the need to hire expensive traveling professionals. Generous federal government assistance helped mitigate some of the financial hits, but St. Rose has not come close to its pre-pandemic caseloads and revenue. It is only through regular significant subsidies from Alameda County that its doors have remained open. That is not sustainable.
Recognizing the bleak future for St. Rose, Eden Health District teamed up with Alameda County Health to commission a six-month study on the hospital’s future. Besides the urgent community interest of maintaining a local safety net, other hospitals in the region knew that if St. Rose closed, they would face the challenge of taking on their patients as happened when Doctors Hospital in San Pablo closed in 2015. Key stakeholders including the City of Hayward, Kaiser Permanente, Washington Hospital, Alameda Health System, the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California, and St. Rose itself all contributed to the study and met frequently to discuss options for St. Rose.
The study concluded that St. Rose could not continue as a stand-alone hospital and that the best outcome would be for a larger health system to acquire it. The St. Rose board of directors, under the leadership of retired Hayward Fire Chief Garrett Contreras, selected Alameda Health System (AHS), which last week agreed to acquire St. Rose. AHS is of one the few California public health systems that has stepped up to save an independent non-profit community safety net hospital in years. In the past decade AHS has successfully integrated struggling local community hospitals Alameda Hospital and San Leandro Hospital into its system.
That happy result would not have been possible without a robust regional effort. Faith and community organizations like Glad Tidings International, La Familia, and Tiburcio Vasquez Health Clinic stepped up alongside larger hospitals. Elected and appointed officials such as Alameda County Supervisor Elisa Marquez, who grew up and still lives in the shadow of St. Rose; Assemblywoman Liz Ortega; Hayward Mayor Mark Salinas, who was born at St. Rose; and Eden Health District Chair Pamela Russo, who was a nurse and administrator at St. Rose for 40 years, engaged their colleagues and won commitments for financial support and debt relief that made the transition feasible.
And most importantly, the patients who depend upon St. Rose, including the Amaya family, showed up at rallies and government hearings to tell their stories and make their heartfelt case for saving their community hospital and their lifeline.
It takes a community to build a hospital, and it takes the vigilance of that community to make sure that hospital will be there for everyone when they, their loved ones, and their neighbors need it.
Mark Friedman is the Chief Executive Officer of the Eden Health District, a public health agency in Alameda County