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No Lack of OC Beds Seen in Anaheim General Closure

Anaheim General Hospital’s pending closure isn’t expected to make a major dent in Orange County’s hospital bed capacity, according to industry sources.

Pacific Health Corp., the Tustin-based parent of Anaheim General, said earlier this month that it would shut down the 142-bed hospital in May.

Pacific is also closing an affiliated 31-bed skilled nursing facility in Buena Park, along with Bellflower Medical Center and Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center.

It had said it was closing its 177-bed Newport Specialty Hospital for nonacute patients, but a 32-bed ward that cares for severely disabled children will remain open, thanks to about $500,000 in funding from CalOptima, the Orange-based agency that administers public healthcare programs in the county.

The pending shutdown of Anaheim General follows a gain of hospital beds in OC with last year’s opening of Kaiser Permanente Anaheim on La Palma Avenue. The hospital has 262 beds, double the number at Kaiser’s facility on Lakeview Avenue, which has been shuttered.

Ratio

The loss of Anaheim General’s beds will leave Orange County with 1.86 hospital beds per 1,000 people, according to the Hospital Association of Southern California.

The OC ratio is below the California state average of 1.9 hospital beds per 1,000 people. The national figure is 2.6 hospital beds per 1,000, according to the association. Neither the association nor the state recommends a particular per capita bed ratio.

And area hospitals have licensed beds that aren’t currently staffed, said Julie Puentes, an association vice president who works out of Garden Grove.

“There’s capacity to grow in terms of staffing up on those additional beds that are already licensed, if that needs to happen,” Puentes said.

“We think that, given that Anaheim General was a pretty small hospital compared to others, and given that their inpatient average daily census was about 20, we think that this is not going to have a significant impact” on the county’s bed situation, she said.

UCI Medical Center, a teaching hospital in nearby Orange, said in a prepared statement that it believes a number of community hospitals in Anaheim General’s area, as well as regional, tertiary-care facilities such as itself “will be able to accommodate the population previously served by Anaheim General.”

There also is the 223-bed AHMC Anaheim Regional Medical Center (previously Anaheim Memorial Medical Center); the 219-bed West Anaheim Medical Center; and Western Medical Center-Anaheim, with 188 licensed beds.

Pacific Health said after the Anaheim General announcement, and prior to CalOptima’s decision to fund the Newport Specialty unit, that it was suspending services at its remaining hospitals “as we work to resolve the legacy issues facing our company.”

The company added that it had stopped providing emergency services at Newport Specialty and the other two hospitals and told the L.A. County Department of Public Health that it couldn’t afford to pay staff or buy essential supplies, among other things.

Past Problems

Anaheim General, which ranked No. 29 on the Business Journal’s annual list of the largest Orange County hospitals with net patient income of $18.9 million in the 12 months through September 2011, had been beset with problems for some years.

Pacific Health agreed to pay a $16.5 million fine to federal authorities last August to settle allegations that they were treating homeless people in order to defraud the government. Pacific subsidiary Los Angeles Doctor’s Hospital Inc. pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud Medicare and Medi-Cal by paying “marketers” over a three-year period to recruit homeless people who acted as patients, according to a 2012 government press release.

Pacific said that the settlement it reached with the U.S. Department of Justice, along with other legal matters from its past, was a factor in its decision to shutter its hospitals.

Such issues “have made it impossible for us to continue operating in this especially challenging economic climate for all healthcare providers,” Pacific said in a statement.

Regulators cut off Medicare reimbursement to Anaheim General in 2009 after several inspections revealed problems, such as medication errors, unsafe medical equipment, expired supplies and improperly sterilized surgical instruments.

Anaheim General regained the certification in October 2010.

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