Dignity plans to replace Sacramento’s Methodist Hospital with new Elk Grove facility by 2027
Dignity Health leaders said Wednesday that south Sacramento will no longer be home to Methodist Hospital when the health care company completes construction of a new hospital in Elk Grove in seven or eight years.
The Elk Grove hospital has been planned for about 10 years, but this is the first time that Dignity officials have said that they would close Methodist Hospital and transfer its medical team to the new facility. It has been about seven years since Dignity built medical offices on the 30-acre site on Elk Grove Boulevard, between Big Horn Boulevard and Bruceville Road.
Dignity is looking at a structure that would house about 100 licensed beds, 58 fewer than currently at Methodist Hospital, said Laurie Harting, senior vice president of Dignity Health Sacramento, in an interview with The Bee. She said that there is room to grow at the 30-acre campus in Elk Grove, but since many surgeries are outpatient, there is just not as much need for beds.
Some Dignity nurses have expressed concern that the move would make the hospital less accessible to the area’s indigent population, but Harting said that caring for the underserved is part of Dignity’s DNA.
She also noted that Methodist would have had to undergo a costly renovation to meet seismic standards that go into effect in 2030, so Dignity leaders had to weigh whether to invest in the old structure or proceed with the project they had been planning in Elk Grove.
“We just felt strongly that we needed to move forward with our plans in Elk Grove, at the hospital there,” Harting said. “We have a lot of respect from the community for the care that we’ve delivered. ... We’re very excited to finally get this project off the ground and moving and to be very active in the Elk Grove community.”
Meeting Elk Grove’s needs
Methodist Hospital President Phyllis Baltz said that Methodist physicians and staff have served the Elk Grove community for more than 45 years and that Dignity is strongly committed to the community.
“Our new hospital plan allows us to continue to honor that,” she said. “The facility we’re envisioning opening is designed to meet the needs of Elk Grove, based on health care trends. We definitely have the ability to expand into the future, and we’ll continue to grow with Elk Grove.”
The plan to shutter Methodist and reduce the number of beds drew fire from some Dignity nurses who, at public meetings last year, expressed concerns that San Francisco-based Dignity would downsize its hospitals in California if the state Attorney General’s Office allowed it to proceed with a merger with Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives.
The attorney general approved the merger in November 2018, and the companies combined operations earlier this year under a new name, CommonSpirit Health. The parent company is based in Chicago.
At a public meeting last year, registered nurse Kathy Dennis said she and her union, the California Nurses Association, did not support the merger for a number of reasons. One of them, she said, was that Dignity had downsized hospitals it owned in other states. She pointed to Dignity’s St. Rose Dominican campus in Henderson, Nev., where the company reduced its emergency room and inpatient beds, eliminated its intensive care unit and cut its acute-care capabilities, resulting in a micro-hospital
“Nurses are concerned that closing Methodist Hospital of Sacramento could harm vulnerable patient populations,” Dennis said Wednesday. “Dignity’s relocation to Elk Grove must not come at the expense of services vital to our patients.”
In fiscal 2017, payments from Medi-Cal made up roughly half of all payer receipts at Methodist Hospital. Medi-Cal is the public health insurance for low-income individuals.
Caring for indigent
Harting said Dignity Health is committed to caring for the entire community, which includes the underserved, and that will not change because of a change in location. The new hospital, she said, is only five minutes away from where Methodist sits today.
Dennis said nurses are also concerned about the reduction of hospital beds, and they are questioning whether that violates a mandate from the California attorney general that Dignity maintain all acute services it offered before its merger with Catholic Health Initiatives.
As part of the merger approval, the attorney general placed certain conditions on Dignity, Catholic Health Initiatives and any future owners. Those conditions included limits on operational changes at each of CommonSpirit’s California hospitals. At Methodist, for example, the attorney general stated that Methodist must continue to operate for at least 10 years after the merger closed.
In an email to The Bee, the attorney general said that Dignity can request a modification of conditions, and Baltz said the company was already working on documents it would send to the state to ensure it remained in compliance. Baltz also noted that Dignity would be seeking to transfer Methodist’s license to the new facility, so the company would continue to operate an acute-care hospital.
But will that new hospital bear the Methodist name? Baltz said that decision has not been made. Often today, hospital operators will name new facilities after big donors.
When will hospital open?
Baltz said the new hospital will likely open in 2026 or 2027. She is leading a planning process that is assessing services the hospital should offer as well as the number of beds and square footage required. She expects to have the specifications early next year, she said, and then will begin looking for a design-build firm to complete the project.
By mid-2020, Baltz said, she expects to have chosen a firm and will begin working with an architect on construction documents. That process normally takes about a year, she said, and when completed, the plans have to be submitted to regulators at the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.
Regulators will review the plans to ensure they meet requirements, Baltz said, and that is typically a two-year process. Consequently, she said, Dignity likely will not break ground on the Elk Grove hospital until late 2023 or early 2024.
Baltz said that Dignity will make a formal announcement about plans for the new hospital in January but that she and her team have a few things on their wish list. All the in-patient rooms will be private, she said, and the hospital’s emergency room will have an observation unit next door with beds for patients whose conditions may require monitoring for a limited period.
“Most hospitals admit observation patients now,” Baltz said, “and often they’re admitted to an acute-care bed. But we will admit them to the observation unit. Those (observation) beds are not counted on your hospital license, so there’s actually more (patient) capacity than what the licensed bed number will say.”
Dignity also is thinking about things like how to get dialysis to patients in the most efficient way, Baltz said, and they plan to transfer over innovative equipment and services that they recently began offering at the current Methodist campus at 7500 Hospital Drive.
Methodist now offers expectant mothers the opportunity to have a doula provide labor support at no added cost, Baltz said, and it has a da Vinci surgical robot that magnifies the surgical area and allows doctors to use surgical instruments as though they are their hands and fingers. Incisions typically are smaller, so surgery is less invasive.
Baltz and Harting said that Dignity has not decided what to do with the Methodist Hospital building. The state Legislature is discussing whether to make changes in current restrictions on the use of these buildings, they said.
“There’s definitely community need for additional skilled beds, for additional psychiatric beds for mental health, essentially for retaining some outpatient access,” Baltz said. “That’s definitely part of what we will evaluate as we move forward with our plans.”
This story was originally published December 12, 2019 at 10:56 AM.
