Nurses rallied outside Suburban Community Hospital in East Norriton, Pa., on July 17 to protest Prime Healthcare's downsizing of the facility and to seek answers to questions they argue that the health system has evaded.
Prime Healthcare Foundation, the nonprofit arm of Ontario, Calif.-based Prime Healthcare acquired Suburban for $35 million in 2016. Now, the health system is converting the 126-bed facility into a microhospital that focuses on emergency care and services such as imaging, lab and pharmacy. Surgical services will no longer be provided at the hospital, which also closed its intensive care unit and behavioral health unit.
The downsizing leaves Suburban with 60 licensed beds — including 26 emergency room beds — and has resulted in significant cuts to services and staff, according to a spokesperson for Pennsylvania Association of School Nurses and Practitioners, a union representing more than 90 nurses at Suburban.
"Prime has systematically cut the services Suburban provides to an already underserved community with unmet medical needs," Octavia Rumer, RN, an emergency department nurse and co-president of Suburban General Nurses' Association, said in a statement shared with Becker's.
So far, more than 30 nurses and ancillary staff have been laid off as a result of the microhospital conversion, according to Ms. Rumer.
Emergency room patients needing surgical or ICU care will have to rely on transfer agreements, which have not been provided to the staff or public, the union said in a statement. The move would significantly reduce patients' access to care and force neighboring hospitals to absorb the overflow.
Prime said in a statement shared with Becker's that the microhospital transition was made "in response to community need" and that Suburban "will continue to provide the quality care patients have come to expect."
Nurses who work at the hospital categorically refute those claims.
SGNA Co-President Terena Stinson, RN, an emergency department nurse, said "Prime likes to put profits before patients" and "is in the habit of telling us how much it costs to fix something as if that will make a difference to us in terms of safety."
Suburban will continue to have inpatient beds with the capacity to hold 60 patients, but not the staff to care for that increase in census, according to Ms. Stinson.
"What Prime hasn't told the community or [Pennsylvania] legislators is that when a patient comes in with a cardiac arrest or needs any emergent type of care or surgical type of service, they will need to be transferred," Ms. Stinson said. "We will no longer be able to support the basic needs of some patients. We don't have our own Transport company stationed at the hospital on the ready 24 hours a day, so transport could take minutes, hours, even days. We don't have a big sister hospital that will accept these patients easily."
Suburban has transfer agreements with Prime's sister hospitals in the region — Roxborough Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia and Lower Bucks Hospital in Bristol — as well as Jefferson Health's Einstein Philadelphia and Montgomery Hospitals, Montgomery Subacute and Respiratory Center, Temple Chestnut Hill Hospital and Temple University Hospital.
Overall, Prime Healthcare operates 44 hospitals and more than 300 outpatient locations across 14 states.