Hospitals’ consolidation clarified
CEO: St. Mary’s ‘is going to have a very vibrant pulse’
TROY >> When St. Peter’s Health Partners launched its ambitious Troy Master Facilities Plan, the goal was to improve the efficiency and coordination of services offered at its two city hospitals.
With a major benchmark in that process about a month away, officials want to make sure the public is not only aware of the coming changes at St. Mary’s and Samaritan hospitals, but also to reassure them those changes will improve health care throughout the city.
“People should expect two very significant components of an integrated health care system,” explained Norman Dascher Jr., CEO of the two hospitals and vice president of Acute Care Troy, during a sitdown interview Monday at St. Mary’s, “high-end, excellent quality of care with inpatient service and high-end, excellent quality of care with outpatient service, which are connected with St. Peter’s Health Partners-affiliated
programs.”
Beginning Oct. 1, Samaritan Hospital will become the sole provider of inpatient acute-care services in the city, while St. Mary’s will transition into an advanced outpatient campus. Once that transition takes place, inpatient services currently offered at St. Mary’s will instead be offered at Samaritan, where there will be 203 inpatient beds.
The intensive, critical and progressive care units at St. Mary’s will also be moved to Samaritan, but St. Mary’s emergency room will remain open as a fullservice department and continue to receive ambulances, at least until a new, expanded emergency room opens at Samaritan next year. Even then, though, Dascher said, people will still be able to come to St. Mary’s for immediate assistance, either through the continuation of the traditional emergency room or transition to an urgent care center.
“It would seem as though urgent care would be where we would be going, but we need to measure the market at that
time and see what this community needs most at that point in time,” he explained. “It will definitely be something. It’ll definitely be an ER, or it will definitely be an urgent care center.”
St. Mary’s will also offer cancer care, outpatient surgery, endoscopy, medical imaging, a women’s health center, a sleep laboratory, laboratory services, a dialysis center, pulmonary testing and rehabilitation, cardiac rehabilitation, wound care, a podiatry clinic, and an anti-coagulation clinic and continue to house primary care physician offices.
But the concern shared by Dascher is that people think the changes spell the end of St. Mary’s, which he said could not be further from the truth.
“There’s a lot going on on this campus,” he said, “but when you hear about consolidating inpatient, people just think ‘Oh dear, the lights are going out.’ There’s still a lot going on on this campus.”
And to make sure the public is aware of the services that will continue to be available at St. Mary’s, as well as those at Samaritan, Dascher said St. Peter’s will be reaching out into the community in a number of ways. For example,
he said, hospital officials will be meeting Thursday night with area emergency responders to explain the changes, with other public outreach efforts to continue in coming months.
“Communicating to the public is certainly a priority because we don’t want people to be confused at all,” he said. “We’re talking to as many people as we can about it, and we’ll continue. We’ll get right to the point where people are sick of hearing it, and then we’ll probably slow it down a little bit.”
This part of the transition was not initially planned to happen until late 2017, along with the opening of the new Heinrich Medicus Pavilion at Samaritan, but with the process running well ahead of schedule, St. Peter’s officials decided to make the changes a year earlier.
The Troy Master Facilities Plan includes construction, renovation and modernization efforts, all of which are underway and aimed at improving inpatient facilities on the Samaritan campus and outpatient facilities on the St. Mary campus. The transition of services is the latest in a series of project milestones, including the opening of the new St. Mary’s Cancer Treatment Center
in June 2015, a new $10 million, 570-car parking garage on the Samaritan campus in August 2015 and the renovated Samaritan Hospital School of Nursing on the St. Mary’s campus a month later.
But while St. Mary’s will no longer provide inpatient services, Dascher said St. Peter’s will fill that space by moving business operations for the entire system from offices on Wolf Road in Colonie into the upper floors of the facility.
“By next summer, the entire upstairs portion of this building will be filled,” he explained.
St. Peter’s will also be leasing space, he said, to an affiliated medical service as-yet unidentified, but one that will fill a need within the community.
The plan will be completed next year with the merger of the two facilities into one hospital with two campuses, but Dascher said St. Peter’s is already looking beyond that. In 2018, for example, the system will replace the linear accelerator at Samaritan used to provide radiation treatment for cancer patients with a new one as the second part of the move of cancer care to St. Mary’s.
“This campus is going to have a very vibrant pulse,” he said. “There’s a lot going
on at this campus, and we don’t want people to think they’re not.”
The plan also includes the elimination of about 125 full-time positions, but nearly all have already been accomplished by eliminating unfilled positions, not refilling positions after staff departures and retirements, and offering impacted staff members other positions within the company. Fewer than 25 current staff are now expected to be impacted, and those individuals are expected to be offered comparable positions within the St. Peter’s
system.
But despite the reduction in staff and the consolidation of many services offered by both facilities, Dascher said St. Peter’s commitment to quality care will not change.
“St. Peter’s Health Partners’ goal is to have an integrated delivery system, so we literally have all the services from birth through hospice,” Dascher said. “These are two very important components of that system.”