There will soon be a new leader for medical staff at West Suburban Medical Center.
On March 10, West Suburban announced Dr. Chidinma Osineme will become president of the hospital’s medical staff, leading 500 providers, starting next month.
According to the West Suburban Medical Staff bylaws, the president of the group is responsible for representing the policies, needs and grievances of the medical staff to the CEO and governing board. Resilience Healthcare, which bought West Suburban and Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago in December 2022, has an advisory board rather than a governing board, and the medical staff is an independent nonprofit group separate from Resilience.
The medical staff president is also responsible for serving as the chair of the Medical Executive Committee, appointing chairs and members of medical staff committees, and authorizing medical staff fund expenditures.
Osineme serves as chief medical officer at Chicago Family Health Center, where she oversees 25-some medical providers and all clinical operations. She has also served as medical director at PCC Community Wellness in Chicago and as associate program director at Carilion Clinic VTC Family Medicine.
“Her expertise spans across various domains, such as maternal and child health, addiction medicine, and academic medicine. She is also an accomplished lecturer and published author in family medicine,” said West Suburban’s statement regarding the Howard University College of Medicine graduate.
Leaders of West Suburban’s medical staff are elected. Most members serve two years each as treasurer/secretary, then vice president before being elected president.
Osineme was elected vice president of West Suburban’s medical staff and changed roles after Dr. Paul Luning resigned as president. Luning will remain in his role – which he’s held since 2007 – as chief medical officer of PCC Community Wellness Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center that West Suburban contracts services from and which hosts doctors doing their residencies at the hospital.
Osineme will fill out the remainder of Luning’s term through June 30, then start her own two-year term as president.
Luning declined to comment on why he resigned as president of West Suburban’s medical staff.
West Suburban sent a statement March 7 that accuses Luning of organizing a campaign to force its CEO Manoj Prasad to sell West Suburban. It also says Luning discouraged potential resident doctors from coming to the hospital’s Family Medicine Residency Program.
West Sub’s future
Three months shy of completing his two-year term, Luning said he resigned at the hospital’s monthly medical executive meeting on March 5. The day after, Luning said he received a cease-and-desist email from the law firm representing the hospital.
Prasad said Luning resigned on March 7 and the cease-and-desist letter is dated March 5.
Luning has been a member of the West Suburban medical staff since 1995, when he was one of two members in the second class of West Suburban’s Family Medicine Residency Program. He was associate program director of the residency program from 2003 to 2020.
The accusations against Luning come after nearly a year of public outcry from resident doctors at West Suburban, who say the state of the hospital has declined since Prasad bought it at the end of 2022.
In its March 7 statement, West Suburban officials said the hospital has hired over 200 staff members in the last year, enhanced services, and bought new equipment like dialysis machines, patient monitors, beds and mattresses, stretchers, wheelchairs, plus ultrasound and operating room equipment.
“We still have much work to do, but just two years out from narrowly averting catastrophe, West Suburban is moving in the right direction,” Prasad said in the March 7 statement. “We’re upgrading, we’re growing, and we’re looking to the future.
And in a March 14 statement, West Suburban announced the opening of a Women’s Health Clinic at both its Oak Park facility and River Forest campus.
“We are very proud and excited to expand our services to include a dedicated unit that will focus on women’s health,” Prasad said in the statement. “This is a significant step for us as we continue providing high quality care that our patients expect and deserve.”
West Suburban medical staff’s leadership changes come at a time when the hospital’s only residency program has lost accreditation. After the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education withdrew West Suburban Medical Center’s accreditation Jan. 21, West Suburban announced March 7 that it would be appealing the withdrawn accreditation.
As residents decide whether to transfer to a hospital with an open residency spot or undergo the matching process again to find a new residency location, they say a major factor in the future of their education is whether Prasad will allow federal Medicare funding – which hospitals get for residents’ education – to travel with them to another hospital. But residents haven’t heard about Prasad’s decision since the director and associate directors of West Suburban’s Family Medicine Residency Program told them over a month ago that they couldn’t take Medicare funding with them.
“There’s really no way to communicate our concerns to [Prasad] and for him to tell us his plans,” Kirtan Patel, a first-year resident at West Suburban, previously told Growing Community Media, the parent company of Austin Weekly News and Wednesday Journal. Residents said they’re trying to organize meetings with Prasad’s lawyer and their union lawyer, but nothing has been scheduled yet. “We want him to discuss it with us.”
When asked whether he’s made a decision about West Suburban’s Medicare funding, or when he will, Prasad told GCM that’s a subject for collective bargaining.
Residents voted to unionize November 2023 in order to have collective bargaining power in asking for better patient safety and investment in their education. Last year, the union had two bargaining sessions in February, one in March, two in April, three in May, and two in June – none of which they said Prasad came to.
According to Prasad, union and hospital lawyers met several times last summer before union lawyers started declining proposed session dates. Now, attorneys from the union and hospital are working to schedule more meetings.
Prasad said he hasn’t attended these meetings because he’s not a part of the bargaining team, and discussing matters related to employment falls under collective bargaining.
“Once they formed the union, they became part of a collective bargaining unit, so it became unlawful for West Suburban Medical Center management to directly discuss any areas that fell under the collective bargaining realm, including all matters relating to their employment, and these communications stopped,” Prasad said.
But the Residents United at West Suburban union says Prasad could be a part of bargaining discussions and he’s not prohibited from talking to residents because they’re unionized.
“As part of that unionization, they made a lot of noise,” Prasad added. “They told a lot of lies to the community, they wasted a lot of time that they should have spent training and refused numerous requests by the designated institutional officer and program director to resolve concerns.”
Now, Prasad said he’s working to better West Suburban’s reputation.
“This institution has served Chicago for more than 110 years,” Prasad said in the March 7 statement. “I’m determined that it sees another 110, and that those years be defined not by financial strife and crises, but by the quality care we provide and the lives we save.”
