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Choctaw County hospital closes |
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Thursday, 17 December 2009 |
By BRIAN HAWKINS
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ACKERMAN — Choctaw County is without a major medical care facility now that the county’s lone hospital has shut down.
Patients are being diverted to hospitals in neighboring communities, including Starkville, Eupora, Louisville and Kosciusko.
In a statement late Wednesday afternoon, Vickey Maddox, director of the Office of Licensure for the Mississippi Health Department, said that Choctaw County Medical Center had “voluntarily” closed its medical center and emergency department on Tuesday after state health investigators confirmed that the facility was not complying with “licensure and certification requirements for medical coverage and that patients were being housed in an unsafe construction zone.”
Maddox said the Health Department declared an “immediate jeopardy” against CCMC and requested that administrators close the hospital because of findings revealed that the facility was being renovated and did not meet fire safety standards.
“The hospital’s four patients were successfully transferred to another care facility and/or discharged,” said Maddox in the statement released Wednesday afternoon.
One hospital staff member, who spoke to the SDN on the condition of anonymity due to job security concerns, said employees were told the fire safety issue involved the renovation of the facility’s sprinkler system, which has been under way for about two weeks.
Ceilings had been removed in both patient rooms and in bathrooms as part of the renovation, the staff member said.
Hospital administrators were also told by fire marshals this past Friday that the fire walls in the emergency room would have to be torn down and redone, the staff member said.
Though Maddox said in her statement that CCMC had not complied with licensure and certification requirements for medical coverage, she did not specify what factors were involved in the hospital’s non-compliance.
The CCMC staff member said it may be because the hospital’s primary doctor has been on medical leave, and the facility has been with a regular physician since Dec. 7.
While some doctors have been brought in for 24- and 48-hour periods, “they are not putting people in beds because they are not there to follow up with the patients,” the staff member said.
On Dec. 9, hospital employees were told that no physician would be covering the emergency room from 7 to 11 p.m. that day, but no physician was available for 12 hours, forcing EMS workers to turn people away from the ER, the staff member said.
In the meantime, all state-issued and other signs for the hospital have been removed and notices have been posted on doors to the facility about the closure that say the shutdown is due to the construction.
Administrators have told employees the closure is temporary, but have given them no date about when they will return to work, the CCMC staff member said.
Additional questions were submitted to Maddox via e-mail through the Health Department’s Public Affairs Office about the lack of a physician, when the hospital might reopen and other issues Wednesday afternoon, but as of press time Wednesday night, answers to those questions had not been received.
CCMC is county-owned, but is managed by Brandywine Health Services through a lease contract with the county.
Brandywine Health Services has defaulted on lease payments to the county, according to The Choctaw Plaindealer, a weekly newspaper in Ackerman.
According to a recent Plaindealer report, the Choctaw County Board of Supervisors met Dec. 1 with four different health management companies about taking over management of CCMC and its adjoining nursing home.
Corporate Management, Inc., Quality Healthcare, Performance Management Group and Pioneer Health Services were the four firms who had representatives meet with the Choctaw supervisors more than two weeks ago, but officials have not yet acted on any of the proposals, according to a Plaindealer report posted on the newspaper’s Web site.
Whether the adjoining nursing home will remain open is also open to question.
The unnamed CCMC staff member said hospital administrators were given 72 hours to find “adequate medical coverage” for the nursing home or face closure on Friday.
Tuesday’s closure of CCMC is not the first time the hospital has shut down. The facility was closed in 2002 due to bankruptcy and remained shuttered for a year until it reopened under the management of Brandywine Health Services.
Attempts to contact hospital administrators for comment about the closure were unsuccessful Wednesday afternoon.
Editor’s note: Other Starkville Daily News staff members contributed to this report.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 18 December 2009 )
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