Major Victory For Southern Hills Patients

Main Category: Nursing / Midwifery
Article Date: 26 Feb 2009 - 7:00 PDT

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Tennessee Agency Denies HCA Bid to Move Southern Hills Neo-Natal Services to StoneCrest Medical Center; Community Calls on HCA to Restore all Services

The Tennessee Health and Services Development Agency today dealt the HCA chain a major setback, voting 5 to 4 to deny their application to move six neo-natal intensive care unit (N-ICU) beds from Southern Hills Hospital to StoneCrest Medical Center.

HCA recently shut down the beds at Southern Hills Hospital, as part of an attempt to shift an array of medical services to a preferred facility, StoneCrest Medical Center, which is located in a higher-income neighborhood. Today's vote does not specifically compel HCA to re-open the NICU beds at Southern Hills, only blocking their transfer to StoneCrest, but RNs from the National Nurses Organizing Committee, which helped lead the opposition to HCA's plan, call on the chain to immediately restore all lost pediatric services to Southern Hills.

"HCA cited an urgent lack of neo-natal intensive care unit beds in the area as the justification for opening these beds at StoneCrest. The patients still need those beds, and HCA has a moral and ethical obligation to re-open them at Southern Hills Hospital," said Malinda Markowitz, RN, an HCA nurse and co-President of the National Nurses Organizing Committee, which represents thousands of RNs in the HCA system.

"We want to thank HSDA and the state of Tennessee for seeing through HCA's falsehoods and deceit in this application," Markowitz continued. "HCA's real motive in abandoning Southern Hills is to engage in 'patient shopping,' sometimes known as 'medical redlining,' and hunt for higher-income, better-insured patients. What might be good for HCA here is clearly detrimental to the public health of Tennessee."

Kathy McGregor, a nurse with NNOC, joined together with Dr. Conchita Martinez, medical director of Nashville's Medicos Para la Familia practice, to write in opposition before the hearing, "Given the impact that the discontinuance of OB services and the NICU has and will continue to have on the Southern Hills community, the availability of OB physicians to practice at Southern Hills Medical Center, and the applicant's lack of good faith in persuing their Certificate of Need, we request that the members of the Health Services and Development Agency of Tennessee deny HCA's application to delicense the NICU beds at Southern Hills and order Southern Hills Hospital to re-open their OB program."

California Nurses Association