Several hospitals announced closures or severe cutbacks last week.
WXIX-TV reports that St. Elizabeth Healthcare Dearborn Hospital in Lawrenceburg, Ind., confirmed it will close its ICU and reduce perioperative services, including ending overnight surgeries, by the middle of May.
Chief Nursing Officer Angela Roberts told WXIX that a six-month review showed only six overnight surgeries per year and seven ICU patients per day in 2025. She said ICU patients will be moved to St. Elizabeth’s Northern Kentucky campuses 30 minutes away, and that Dearborn will ensure proper staffing for those patient transfers. She added that many patients already travel to the Northern Kentucky campuses for care.
WXIX spoke with an anonymous nurse practitioner who has worked at the hospital for 15 years who said staff were stunned by the announcement. “Everybody is angry, everybody is upset, everybody feels blindsided — [it's] wholly unfair that St. Elizabeth would make this decision to affect their communities in such a negative way,” the nurse practitioner said.
“When we were taking a look at it, did it tug at my heartstrings? Absolutely,” Ms. Roberts told the TV station. “Is it the right thing to do? Absolutely for this community because I want to make sure this community has a hospital that is providing the care that has a very high volume.”
She added that the hospital has struggled with staffing challenges. “We have a small OR staff at Dearborn and they were taking quite a bit of call hours … it was getting harder to recruit,” she said. “When we are seeing all these changes in health care, we’ve got to look at efficient use of resources because we can’t be everything for everyone right now with this evolving healthcare system and we really want to focus on what’s really being utilized within the community.”
Gothamist reported that Hudson Regional Health’s (HRH) Heights University Hospital in Jersey City, N.J, formerly known as Christ Hospital and a fixture in the city since 1872, was set to close over this past weekend due to longstanding financial challenges. The outlet reports that HRH has repeatedly called the facility “financially untenable.”
All that remains to close, however, is the emergency department. The rest of the facility was shuttered in November.
An HRH spokesperson told Gothamist that said the hospital’s losses threatened the system’s overall financial health, “jeopardizing operations” at its facilities in Secaucus, Bayonne and Hoboken. The spokesperson added that since HRH took over Heights, the health system and its chairman, Yan Moshe, have invested more than $100 million to try to stabilize its operations, but the hospital still lost $74 million.
The spokesperson blamed the losses on federal funding cuts enacted by the Trump administration, state cuts to charity care funding and rising rates of uninsured patients.
Gothamist reports that Health Professionals & Allied Employees (HPAE), the hospital’s nurses’ union, has urged the state to investigate HRH for “the sudden closure and its actions since taking over the hospital.” According to HPAE President Debbie White, “This employer has repeatedly violated laws and any penalty has failed to dissuade them from taking further illegal action. It seems that their business ventures come first even if it may put patients’ lives at risk. Our union members and the patients they care for need Gov. Sherrill to intervene immediately and take action to stop the closure.”
Jersey City Mayor James Solomon told Gothamist the city is consulting with state officials and exploring options to keep the hospital open. “This is unacceptable, especially since just a year ago, their CEO said that the future is bright for patients in the Heights,” he said. “I will use all my power to reverse this decision.”
Jersey City Councilmembers Joel Brooks, Thomas Zuppa and Jake Ephros called for a state probe and issued a joint statement: “This decision will hit hardest in the neighborhoods and households that already face the greatest barriers to care: low-income families, seniors, people with disabilities, residents with chronic conditions, and immigrants and mixed-status families who may already be reluctant to seek care until a situation becomes dire. It will also strain first responders and neighboring hospitals across Hudson County as patient volume and transport times rise.”
The HRH spokesperson acknowledged the elected officials’ desire to keep the emergency department open and told Gothamist that HRH is “currently evaluating the feasibility of this request with the NJ Department of Health and all stakeholders.”
Kaleida Health is selling Bradford Regional Medical Center to Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine (LECOM), pending regulatory approvals. The news comes after Kaleida’s announcement earlier in February that it had submitted a closure notice to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the hospital, blaming the region’s declining population and federal funding cuts.
However, perioperative services at the hospital are set to close. Under LECOM, its 95-bed skilled nursing facility will stay open, but its 20-bed inpatient unit and emergency department will still be shuttered.
WPSU reports that, according to Kaleida officials, Bradford Regional Medical Center has lost an average of $10 million every year since 2021, and that it tried to convert the hospital to an outpatient emergency department without inpatient beds – a violation of Pennsylvania law.
State Rep. Martin Causer told WPSU, “Our focus now is finding a solution to keep the emergency department open.” Bradford City police chief Michael Ward posted to social media that the closure of the emergency department is “extremely concerning.”
