Expected to close after years of financial ill health, Mount Vernon Hospital with state backing has embarked on a $50-million investment project to restructure its services and build and renovate facilities on its downtown campus. About 100 layoffs are planned with the change to more outpatient clinical services and new residential care for seniors.
The largest element of the hospital”™s 21st-century overhaul, the $32-million construction of a 147-bed assisted-living residence for the elderly, is expected to break ground in summer of 2011 and open by 2013, said John Spicer, president and CEO of Sound Shore Health System. Mount Vernon Hospital joined the health system in 1997 when it affiliated with Sound Shore Medical Center in New Rochelle. The senior care center will be managed by The Wartburg Adult Care Community in Mount Vernon.
The state Health Department has committed about $23 million to the hospital restructuring through its HEAL NY grant program, Spicer said. “They”™ve become our partners,” he said. “They know that this hospital is critical to this community.”
ER to get major upgrade
Spicer said the hospital already has begun a $3.5 million, one-year renovation project in its emergency room that will double emergency room space and create a 25-bed state-of the-art facility. The hospital, which accepts both insured and uninsured patients, has 22,000 emergency visits yearly, he said.
The hospital also is building a new 35-bed inpatient medical-surgical unit that includes a critical care center. Occupancy in the unit, currently with 55 beds, dropped from 40 percent to 28 percent between 2005 and 2009, according to a hospital spokesman.
Spicer said the hospital has invested more than $6 million in a computer system upgrade and next February will introduce an electronic medical record shared by the Mount Vernon hospital and physicians”™ offices and the Sound Shore Health System.
While avoiding the fate of other community hospitals that have closed in Westchester County and the region, the 119-year-old hospital in Mount Vernon will lay off about 100 of its 635 current employees. Spicer said the cuts will include 20 physicians, 27 nurses, 10 management positions and nearly 50 line-worker jobs. He said, though, the hospital should see a net loss of about 40 jobs when the three-year project is complete and some laid-off workers are reabsorbed.
Spicer called an outpatient diabetes care center the “centerpiece” of immediate development at the 358,500-square-foot hospital on North Seventh Avenue. The center, which includes the continuing chronic wound care clinic and hyperbaric center for Sound Shore Health System members, is expected to open by February.
A secure financial model
Daryl DeVerna, chairman of the board of trustees, said the board has wrestled for years with the hospital”™s financial losses. The revitalization project budget includes $5.9 million to pay down bank debt. Trustees and their planning partners have created “a new model that is financially secure and addresses the needs of our community,” DeVerna said.
Mount Vernon Mayor Clinton Young, a hospital trustee, called the recent public unveiling of plans for its future “a day of victory for the city of Mount Vernon.” With financially failing hospitals closing around the region, “We were no exception,” he said. “We thought at some point that we would have to close.”
Young said the transformation plan, developed over two years with input from physicians, hospital staff and the community, will significantly reduce layoffs at a major employer and “cornerstone” of the city.
“We”™re certainly not where we want to be, but we”™re in a better place than we were even nine months ago,” Young said.
