The University of Mississippi Medical Center obviously has a plan for what it plans to do with Greenwood’s hospital once the long-term lease goes through, assuming it does.
It would be helpful if UMMC would share what it has in mind.
So far, it has said nothing. Maybe it can’t, given that negotiations on the lease are still ongoing with Greenwood Leflore Hospital officials.
Those negotiations are taking longer than had been anticipated.
Gary Marchand, the interim CEO who is shepherding the Greenwood hospital through the takeover while also trying to make sure it doesn’t run out of money before the switch is completed, originally anticipated that all the details of the lease agreement would be worked out by the end of September.
A week into October, though, there are apparently still a couple of sticking points, the nature of which are not being made public. There is no reason to hit the panic button yet, but the clock is ticking.
Once the final terms of the contract have been hammered out, here’s what still has to happen:
The Greenwood City Council and the Leflore County Board of Supervisors must approve the lease, since the Greenwood hospital is jointly owned by the city and the county. If either of those boards tries to amend any of the terms, the lease agreement has to go back to the hospital board for its concurrence, and presumably UMMC’s, too.
The City Council appears ready to accept the hospital board’s recommendation, whatever it is. Concerns keep circulating, though, about what the Board of Supervisors might do. I will be shocked if a majority of the supervisors do not vote for the lease. Most of them seem to get that, even if the lease is not everything they might hope for, there’s really no other good option. It’s either get on board with UMMC or get ready to close the hospital. No one wants to risk that.
The final step for the lease would be approval from the state College Board, which oversees UMMC. The College Board’s last scheduled meeting for this year is Nov. 17. Even if the College Board were agreeable to dealing with this issue in an emergency meeting in December, a month’s delay could be risky, given the Greenwood hospital’s precarious financial condition. It might go broke before the lease is finalized.
Greenwood Leflore Hospital’s announcement this past week that it was “permanently closing” its maternity ward caused some in this community to gasp. Of the most basic services expected from a hospital, delivering babies comes foremost to many people’s minds.
What apparently didn’t register with people earlier is that the Greenwood hospital stopped delivering babies weeks ago. When the hospital shut down most of its operations for three days in mid-August following a sewage leak, it only used the labor and delivery unit for emergency deliveries. By the end of that month, it closed the unit completely, the result of the cost-cutting decision to no longer use prohibitively expensive contract nurses to adequately staff it.
Recent developments, though, indicate that the closure is not just an emergency measure. They strongly suggest that UMMC has no intention of reopening the maternity ward if it takes over the Greenwood hospital. It will operate an obstetrics clinic here, but it wants the babies to be delivered at its hospital in Grenada.
That strategy may be the most efficient use of physical plant and nursing staff, but it is already costing Greenwood two obstetricians, who couldn’t see themselves each doing 10 days of call a month 30 miles away from their homes here.
Dr. Terry McMillin, one of the obstetricians departing over the shift toward Grenada, said he also understands the Grenada hospital has a better payer mix than Greenwood, with a higher percentage of patients covered by private insurance rather than the less lucrative Medicaid. That could further explain UMMC’s decision. Expectant mothers with private insurance have more options of where they go to have their babies delivered than those on Medicaid. In an effort to hold down the number of private payers going to Oxford or Jackson, UMMC might think there’s less financial risk to inconveniencing obstetric patients in Greenwood than those in Grenada.
Regardless, it’s coming into focus what services Greenwood may lose in its partnership with UMMC-Grenada: labor and delivery, pediatric inpatient care, possibly intensive care.
What’s it going to gain besides, of course, staying open?
The sooner UMMC can answer that, the better everyone will feel about the transition.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
