New information was not forthcoming a day after the Greenwood Leflore Hospital Board declined to approve a proposed affiliation with the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Board Attorney Tom Flanagan said Wednesday he was not comfortable discussing what happened in executive session the night before at the publicly owned hospital’s board meeting.
Board member Sammy Foster, who presided over the meeting in the absence of Chairman Brian Waldrop, declined to comment.
Board members Freddie White-Johnson and Emma Bell did not return calls requesting comment.
According to Dr. John F. Lucas III, who filled in as the physician liaison to the board in place of Dr. George Smith at Tuesday’s meeting, the issue of affiliating with UMMC was introduced and briefly discussed, but none of the three board members present made a motion to approve the agreement.
It is not clear whether that means the issue is now dead or whether the board plans to vote on the affiliation later. It is also unclear whether, from UMMC’s perspective, there is a time limitation on making a decision about the agreement.
In general, according to Joyce Chiles, the attorney for the Leflore County Board of Supervisors, who also was present for the closed-door meeting, boards can raise agenda items for reconsideration if they die for lack of a motion, as the proposal for an affiliation with UMMC reportedly did on Tuesday.
The board meeting’s public session, which started at 6 p.m., lasted for less than 30 minutes before the board retreated into executive session with Flanagan, Chiles, Lucas, Chief of Staff Henry Flautt and Chief Financial Officer Dawne Holmes present.
At just a little past 7 p.m., both Lucas and Flautt left the meeting when the board began a longer discussion of physician contracts. At the end of the meeting, around 8:30 p.m., Foster said the board voted to approve those contracts, but he made no mention of the affiliation agreement discussion.
At a joint meeting last week of the Greenwood City Council, the county Board of Supervisors and the hospital board, Foster, Bell and White-Johnson expressed reservations about the proposed affiliation agreement with UMMC. Specifically, they questioned whether the 10-member advisory board proposed in the agreement would erode local control of the hospital.
The affiliation agreement calls for a joint steering council, made up of five appointees each from UMMC and the Greenwood hospital, to make recommendations as the affiliation moves forward. Any actions taken by the steering council would be subject to the approval of the boards of the hospital and UMMC.
Board members could be a part of that advisory council or not.
The proposed agreement rose out of talks the hospital has had for the last few months with UMMC.
Last week, Greenwood Leflore Hospital’s medical staff unanimously endorsed the affiliation agreement as well as a separate but related management agreement in which UMMC would provide the hospital with an interim CEO. The Greenwood hospital has been without a chief executive since March.
Lucas and others have expressed the opinion that the hospital cannot continue to go forward, losing money, without affiliating with a larger institution. However, only one board member, Waldrop, has publicly expressed support for partnering with UMMC.
The Greenwood hospital has lost $6.1 million over the first nine months of the current fiscal year and is on path to suffer a multimillion-dollar loss for the third straight year.
The affiliation was believed to be a stop-gap measure as officials investigated the possibility of leasing the hospital to UMMC or another large medical institution.
This week, the Board of Supervisors and the City Council voted to authorize the conducting of a feasibility study, the first step in what could be a yearlong process of soliciting and reviewing lease proposals for the hospital, which is jointly owned by the city and county. A final decision of whether to enter into a long-term lease would fall to the hospital board.
The hospital board is normally composed of five members. Currently, the appointment to fill a vacancy on the board has been delayed following a disagreement between the city and county about how that appointment should be made. An attorney general’s opinion has stated the fifth board member has to be jointly appointed by both the city and county.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
