Monday, May 09, 2011
Chicago Sun-Times
by Sun Times editorial staff

Since Oak Forest Hospital opened in 1910, it has been a poor farm, a tuberculosis sanitarium, a chronic disease hospital and a pauper’s cemetery.

Now, Cook County officials want to convert the county-owned facility into an outpatient-only center, but they are running into stiff opposition from those who say the south suburbs can’t afford to lose the hospital’s inpatient services. The pastor of a Robbins church even began fasting on Tuesday across the street from the hospital to protest the plan.

The Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board will vote Tuesday on the county’s plan. The board, which earlier rejected the concept by a 3-2 vote, should reverse itself and let the plans for an outpatient center go forward.

The arguments against closing the 213-bed hospital are many, and in some instances heartrending, as is often the case in health care debates.

Among the objections are these:

† The area served by the hospital would no longer have enough beds for long-term or intensive-care-unit patients.

† Indigent people would no longer have reasonable access to health care.

† Other hospitals in the area won’t pick up the slack because they can’t afford to serve Oak Forest’s low-income patients.

† Some patients would be transferred to the county’s Stroger Hospital, which can take hours to reach on public transportation from the south suburbs.

Some employees would lose their jobs.

But as Terry Mason, chief medical officer of the Cook County Health and Hospital System, points out, the county’s budget squeeze requires making the best possible use of tax dollars to benefit the widest possible number and range of patients. The county thinks it can save $25 million a year while providing a wider range of health services to a larger number of people.

At one time, Oak Forest was designed to serve 1,100 long-term patients. But last year, Sun-Times reporters found two-thirds of Oak Forest’s beds were empty, a fifth of its 41 buildings were vacant and its staff of 743 doctors, nurses and other employees tended to an average of just 55 patients a day, a number that since has dropped to just over 40.

The county simply has to do a better job than that of dispensing health care efficiently.

Oak Forest, one of three county-owned hospitals, is not a full-service hospital. It doesn’t accept ambulances. It doesn’t have the equipment to help someone who is having a heart attack. The intensive care unit averages only about five patients, and it is really more of a medical monitoring center than a full-fledged modern ICU. No new long-term patients have been admitted since 2007.

But the county’s plan is not just about saving money. It’s also about improving health care and putting services where people live, not where officials decided to build a facility a century ago.

Access to outpatient specialty care is generally difficult for the poor and uninsured, but those are exactly the services that would be expanded under the county’s plan. The expansion would ease outpatient wait times. In fact, the county expects the changes will boost patient visits throughout the system by 50 percent to 900,000 a year. That’s a lot of extra people receiving much-needed care.

The county has been working since 2008 on its plan to improve south suburban medical services.

It’s time for the state to let the county move forward.