St. Joseph to Shut Down Its Trauma Center in Burbank

Officials at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank have decided to close the hospital’s trauma center, dealing another blow to Los Angeles County’s wobbly emergency services network, it was disclosed Monday.

St. Joseph’s board of governors recently decided to close the trauma center, which has lost $1.5 million annually for the last five years, said Mark Dundon, vice president of operations for the Sisters of Providence in Seattle, owners of the 647-bed hospital.

Dundon said the decision to “discontinue” the hospital’s participation in the county’s trauma network came after many months of discussion among top hospital executives.

In a letter to employees in February, hospital official Daniel F. Fahey said that the hospital’s financial losses have been caused by “grossly inadequate reimbursement by the county for these services. Such a large financial drain is clearly unacceptable and cannot continue, since it jeopardizes the viability of our other medical services.”

Decision This Week

Fahey was not available for comment Monday, but hospital spokeswoman Gail Foy said that a decision about the trauma center would be announced by the end of this week.

Virginia Price Hastings, chief of paramedics and trauma hospitals for Los Angeles County, said she has not yet been officially notified of the St. Joseph’s decision, but said she believes from her conversations with hospital executives that they are intent on closure. By law, the hospital must give the county 60 days notice before closing the trauma center.

“It’s not a matter of if they’re going to close, it’s a matter of when,” Hastings said. “It’s clear we’re going to have another large uncovered area” of the county not served by a trauma center, which is required to have such specialists as neurosurgeons and orthopedists on the premises or available within 30 minutes at all times.

Local Emergency Rooms

Trauma victims in the zone previously served by St. Joseph will instead have to rely on trauma centers farther away or on local emergency rooms, which may have less sophisticated equipment and fewer specialists on call.

“If you need a surgeon, the doctors in the emergency room will call one, and the surgeon may or may not get there before you bleed to death. It’s that simple,” she said.

Since 1985, when the trauma system was set up in Los Angeles County, eight of 23 participating hospitals have dropped out.

“It’s clear we don’t have a whole (trauma) system in the county any longer,” Hastings said. “Some parts are functioning well, but there are large parts of the county that have no trauma service at all.”

She cited as examples parts of the San Gabriel Valley as well as a large area around Los Angeles International Airport.

Centers in Pasadena, Northridge

The trauma center at St. Joseph--which treated 657 trauma patients in 1988--serves the city of Burbank and a large section of the northeast San Fernando Valley. The next closest trauma centers are located at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills and Northridge Hospital Medical Center, Hastings said.

She said that if St. Joseph closes its trauma center, the county will contact these other hospitals to see if their trauma centers can accept additional patients.

But paramedics warned that this is no long-term solution.

Fred Hurtado, president of the United Paramedics of Los Angeles, a labor union, said that re-routing ambulances to more distant hospitals results in “longer transport times and longer response times” for ambulances “at increased jeopardy to patients and paramedics.”