Community and rural hospitals across Western New York are undergoing significant upheaval, with dramatic changes unfolding at several of those facilities in the past few weeks.
For one, Eastern Niagara Hospital closed in mid-June, ending its 115-year run in Lockport after several years of financial instability.
Then, on the other side of Niagara County, Catholic Health announced a plan to convert Mount St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston into a neighborhood hospital – the same model guiding the Buffalo health system’s construction of Lockport Memorial Hospital.
And in Warsaw, the Wyoming County-owned health system – just weeks after ending baby deliveries at its hospital – filed plans to cut more than 40% of its inpatient beds to ensure long-term viability.
“The pandemic made things worse, but a lot of these trends have been going on for decades,” said Larry Zielinski, a health care administration expert at University at Buffalo.
Covid-19 accelerated the movement toward outpatient settings, with more patients receiving care outside of hospitals. That has hit the smaller hospitals even harder, Zielinski explained, because they’re often caring for the less-intensive patients who also could be served in ambulatory centers. On top of that, the community hospitals – especially those in rural settings – often struggle to have enough volume coming through the door to sustain certain services and retain specialists.
That’s not to say the big systems aren’t struggling, too. Operating losses last year totaled about $175 million at Catholic Health and nearly $81 million at Kaleida Health. Nationally, Zielinski noted that respected industry leader Geisinger, a 10-hospital system in Pennsylvania, had a $239 million operating loss last year and, not long after, announced it would be acquired by the much-larger Kaiser Permanente.
“I’m sitting here thinking, ‘Man, if Geisinger can’t make it work, what hope do the rest of us have?’”…
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