About two dozen resident doctors at West Suburban Medical Center demonstrated in early May against what they said are worsening conditions and a lack of resources since Dr. Manoj Prasad took ownership of the hospital in December 2022.
And in what residents call an unprecedented move, the hospital’s teaching faculty have called on an accrediting agency to investigate whether the residency program is good enough to continue operating.
The 26 resident doctors at the West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park unionized in November, the first time that medical staff there had done so. After struggling to meet with Prasad, the Residents United at West Suburban union started contract negotiations in February, requesting investment in their education and better patient safety at the for-profit hospital where a majority of patients are on Medicaid, according to medical residents.
“During these meetings, Dr. Prasad has made it very clear that he does not care about our request to improve patient safety, regarding the stripping of the resources of this hospital, resident education and having absolutely no budget,” said Maryam Farooqui, a first-year resident at West Suburban and one of three residents bargaining with Prasad’s lawyers for the union contract.
As contract negotiations continue, West Suburban faculty who teach residents in the hospital’s family medicine program have requested that the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education return to West Suburban to analyze what they say is a substandard and underfunded program. That’s an unprecedented action by hospital faculty, according to residents.
“After the faculty announced that they had sent the letter to the ACGME, there was just so much apathy and desolation amongst the residents because we were like, ‘We’re going to go on probation again, and the residency might get shut down,’” said Lauren Lucas, a first-year resident who’s also on the union’s bargaining team. “We have the ability to do something and say something about what’s happening, and this was the result.”
Resident doctors said they have asked Prasad to meet to discuss their issues with patient care, but he has refused, saying the only way he’d meet was with resident doctors’ lawyers.
“The residents have chosen to exercise their rights to unionize and bargain collectively through lawyers,” Prasad said in an email to Growing Community Media. “Respecting that process, I do not feet that it is appropriate for me to directly deal with the residents on matters dealing with wages, hours and terms and other conditions of employment.”
At the start of 2022, the ACGME withdrew accreditation from the hospital’s internal medicine residency program.
The ACGME also gave West Suburban’s family medicine residency program probationary accreditation. Although the program is no longer on probation and is now the hospital’s only program for medical residents, the call to bring the ACGME back inspired residents’ recent “unity break,” or demonstration, to fight against the underfunded program.
“Every resident in the United States gets federal funding from Medicare,” hundreds of thousands of dollars per resident, according to Clarissa O’Conor, a third-year resident and member of the union’s bargaining team. “Since Prasad has taken over, he has refused to allocate any money to the residency program.”
When asked how much funding goes toward the residency program, Prasad told Growing Community Media that the program is funded with federal money tied to patient volume and other metrics.
Underfunded programs like this not only affect the quality of training residents receive, but also impact morale at work, residents said.
“The quality of care given to patients is dependent on the wellbeing of our residents,” said Emily Goodlin, a second-year resident, at the demonstration.
Patient safety
“Working at our hospital has become an insurmountable task. The lack of resources makes it almost impossible to provide the most basic services,” said Iris Marin, a third-year resident.
Second-year resident Nkiru Osefo agreed.
“In the last two years I’ve been here in my residency, I’ve seen a dramatic shift in patient care, staff safety and education that all would say are more than disgraceful and disrespectful,” Osefo said.
Medical residents said West Suburban’s building has fallen into disrepair, and its resources have followed, affecting the care they give to patients. They said they experience daily environmental hazards, including air conditioners and elevators that don’t work regularly and rusty drinking water.
“We’ve had to do procedures, which are supposed to be sterile, with drops of sweat running down our face because of the AC in the hospital not working. Patients deliver babies that then have to stay in a hot nursery because the chillers are, once again, down,” Marin said. “Patients are not able to attend appointments because the elevators are out of service and they cannot go up six flights of stairs.”
Residents said their clinics have shut down several times because of overheating. Residents bought fans with their own money to cool their lounge, where the lights are often off to keep the room cooler and the water cooler — a source of non-rusty drinking water — was recently removed because of budget cuts, according to residents.
Prasad said these claims are inaccurate. The hospital, he said, doesn’t have rusty water, uses faucet filters, and the Village of Oak Park regularly tests the water.
Prasad said the building did recently experience a failure in its dated cooling system, leading to repairs that are still in-process.He added that West Suburban installed an 8,000-ton cooling unit that should last for decades. Six of the hospital’s 24 elevators are out-of-service due to abuse by users, Prasad said. Repairs to fix bent elevator doors are underway.
“We inherited a 100-year-old building that had not been adequately maintained due to frequent ownership changes,” Prasad said.
Because of these conditions, several staff members who have worked at West Suburban for years quit within the last year since Prasad hasn’t addressed their concerns, according to residents.
“Our specialists have quit, and many services are no longer available or are only available on a very limited basis,” Marin said.
Access to services like surgery and psychiatry have dwindled. Farooqui said nurses no longer have transport staff on weekends to help them move patients from floor-to-floor.
“Like any other hospital, we have many who have left and many colleagues who have joined us, and more importantly, some who left us have come back to us,” Prasad said. “We continue to offer services in the safest way possible and services have not diminished.”
According to residents, Prasad also barred resident doctors from attending regular hospital patient safety meetings, where three resident doctors are on the committee. Residents said Prasad sent a notice to faculty and residents that they were no longer welcomed at that meeting.
Prasad, however, denied this.
“I did not send any such notice. We have invested in a new incident reporting system and [are] designing new incident evaluation processes with a limited number of individuals,” Prasad said. “Until that gets established to become an impactful safety tool, participation has been limited to certain members of our staff.”
‘I don’t want to send anybody I love here’
Residents said Prasad’s behavior is all the more frustrating because, when he took over the hospital at the end of 2022, he promised to save it from bankruptcy and continue caring for the community.
In October 2022, Pipeline Health filed for bankruptcy, then sold West Suburban to Resilience Healthcare, where Prasad is CEO.
Prasad previously told the Wednesday Journal that Resilience Healthcare acquired West Suburban and Weiss Memorial Hospital for $92 million, which included their real estate and over $80 million of Pipeline’s debt.
“We’d been working with Pipeline, these venture capitalists in California who really eroded the integrity of the care we felt we were able to provide,” said Wil Ward, a third-year resident. “Dr. Prasad started his first day of work in the auditorium in front of a hospital full of employees promising change, big change,” he added. “Dr. Prasad said that he would bring more transparency and accessibility than employees have ever experienced.”
When Prasad took over West Suburban, he said his goal was to first financially stabilize a hospital experiencing crumbling infrastructure and a lack of equipment and supplies. While he works to get the hospital out of debt, he said West Suburban has not missed or been late in paying any of its 1,800 employees.
“We always obtain and provide supplies on time, every time, to provide safe services. We have added and replaced a lot of medical equipment, repaired and stabilized the infrastructure and [are] continuing to do so,” Prasad said. “The hospital, which was teetering and tottering on the verge of closure at one time, is now stabilized, functioning and slowly growing.”
But residents said Prasad hasn’t listened to their feedback to improve patient safety and want him to follow through on his promises to invest in the hospital.
“I don’t want to send anybody I love here,” said first-year resident Anna Petersen during the unity break. “We are some of the best doctors I’ve ever met. We’re brand new, but these people here care so much, and the fact that we can’t provide good medical care to the people who need it the most is devastating.”
“We care about our patients, but do you care about them, too?” first-year resident Jamie Chan rhetorically asked Prasad at the unity break. “We hope that you will finally put patients first, over profit, on your agenda.”
In the most recent bargaining session for their contract May 8, Prasad’s lawyers offered residents no raise over the next three years and declined to increase funding for educational conferences and supplies, like textbooks and stethoscopes, according to O’Conor. The work phones residents are required to carry have been malfunctioning for months, O’Conor added, and Prasad keeps crossing out “functioning” in the contract proposals for improved phones.
“Like other small community hospitals, our hospital is not immune from the challenges of increasing costs and shrinking reimbursements, but we feel confident that we can overcome,” Prasad said. “Our goal is to remain a dependable and robust hospital serving the needs of our community.”
