On the Fate of Alta Bates Vital East Bay hospital clinging to life support

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n 2015, Sutter Health announced that it would close Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley. Since then, the community pressure to keep the hospital open has been unrelenting.

This month, the Berkeley City Council decided to ask Sutter to either rebuild in Berkeley or sell the property to another hospital that’s willing to come up with a solution other than closure.

UC Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development has also just released a report detailing the dramatic health impacts an Alta Bates closure would have on the region.

An Alta Bates closure, it found, would have impact on nearly everyone in the East Bay: “The closing of Alta Bates Campus will have potentially significant adverse health impacts related to: birthing/obstetrics; ED care for the elderly, uninsured, homeless and people of color; private vehicle travel times for certain areas of the East Bay, particularly Western Contra Costa County, disaster response capacity, and some UC Berkeley student health care needs.”

Those are very real, very serious social costs, and they aren’t to be taken lightly. It’s no wonder that Berkeley is fighting this closure with all of the tools at its disposal.

Hospital closures displace patients, overburden the hospitals that remain open and adversely affect regional mortality. Patients also struggle with longer travel times, which can be fatal in emergency situations.

Residents in northwest Alameda County and West Contra Costa County are still struggling to absorb the 2015 closure of Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo. Many of them have became more reliant on Alta Bates in the years since then.

Sutter has sensible reasons for trying to shut down Alta Bates. The hospital doesn’t meet current seismic standards. By law, California hospitals must comply with retrofitting standards by 2030 or be shut down.

Sutter, which also operates an Oakland campus about 3 miles away, has decided it’s not cost-effective to do an expensive retrofit for Alta Bates. According to Sutter, the problem would be not only the expense of the retrofit itself, but also the fact that the retrofit would cause big operational challenges within the hospital once it was complete.

It’s pledged to move emergency services and other acute care to its Oakland campus, about 3 miles away, by 2030. Some services, like the cardiac catheterization lab, have already been moved.

“We are committed to the East Bay area and to developing a regional solution that works for all,” Sutter spokeswoman Amy Thoma Tan said in a statement.

Unfortunately, while consolidating patients and services may make sense for Sutter, it will come at a high cost to the East Bay.

It’s cold comfort, but East Bay patients are not alone. Across the country, hospitals have been closing at the rate of about 30 per year, according to the American Hospital Association.

This year, Morgan Stanley analysts found that 8 percent of hospitals around the country are at risk of closing, and another 10 percent are considered “weak.”

There are a wide variety of reasons why hospitals are on the edge.

There’s been significant consolidation in the sector, which has resulted in a push toward outpatient and other less-expensive services.

In some ways, technological improvements have helped hospitals reduce staff costs, but they’ve also led to more outpatient services (including the rise of options like telemedicine).

Hospitals in both rural and urban areas often struggle with their patient mix. Too many patients who are older or poorer can have a devastating impact on a hospital’s bottom line.

These larger trends certainly make Alta Bates less attractive as an investment, and they could frustrate city officials’ attempts to salvage a deal for the hospital. Sutter’s regional solution — which is still in the works — needs to be one that works for its patients, not just its bottom line.