In a community meeting Monday evening, West Side and Oak Park activists crowded a room at the Oak Park library’s main branch and were joined by staff members from the now-shuttered West Suburban Medical Center.
While the mission of the gathering was to look ahead to the role community members might play in reopening the hospital, there was also considerable venting by former staff who, for the first time, spoke publicly about deteriorating conditions within the hospital over the three years it has been operated by Dr. Manoj Prasad and his Resilience Healthcare system.
The frustration was largely directed at Prasad with stories about broken X-ray machines and ultrasound equipment being repossessed by unpaid vendors. However, Jessica Causero, a nurse at West Sub for five years, lathered blame on the Illinois Department of Public Health for failing to exact consequences on West Sub for continual failings during state inspections.
“IDPH has been in the hospital every week,” she said. “They have blood on their hands for turning a blind eye to what they’ve seen and the piss-poor care that has resulted.”
In an interview with Wednesday Journal, Causero said IDPH had conducted multiple investigations at the hospital following evidence of a patient’s death when proper staff were not available to intubate that patient and ER doctors being called to other areas of the hospital when no other doctors were present. And yet, she said, IDPH did not deliver consequences to West Sub.
Dr. Theresa Chapple was one of the lead organizers of the meeting, which attracted about 75 people. Her focus was on making a community plan for how the hospital could potentially be reopened. A public health professional and formerly Oak Park’s health director, Chapple said she “has seen many hospitals close but only a few reopen. But we can learn lessons from those which reopened.”
Chapple said later the goal of this hastily gathered group should be to have its own reopening plan in place by mid-July, in the event Prasad fails to reopen West Sub.
Dr. Thomas Fisher, an ER doctor at the University of Chicago and recently an unsuccessful candidate to replace Cong. Danny Davis in the 7th District, said the group needs to look at a wider picture of failing urban safety-net hospitals while honing in on the problems at West Sub.
Hospitals that have closed and then reopened, he said, “have come back because of rooms [of people] like this. He suggested that key points of focus for the plan need to be putting pressure on political leaders at the village, city, county and state levels, while also building an effective outreach to the philanthropic community.
Before the meeting closed, Chapple and her co-facilitator, Dr. Mohi Ahmed, worked to organize the large crowd toward signing up for specific working groups to begin a planning effort. Those subgroups included political, legal, leadership models, community needs, partnerships and alliances, messaging and workers.
When discussing what needs the community feels a reopened West Sub would need to offer, Chapple said an option she has seen work is a phased reopening process. If maternity care was a community priority, then perhaps that unit could open first. Or the ER.
Meeting attendees discussed how to gather that input, with a special emphasis on hearing from West Siders. There was also a debate over whether it was necessary or advisable to attempt to work with Prasad on any plan. Some speakers noted that he still owns the hospital and said there needs to be some “solidarity” with him. Others, mainly former staff members, said Prasad would have to be pushed out of ownership for any resuscitation to occur.
Dr. Chidinma Osineme, the chief medical officer at West Sub, was one speaker who said Prasad would need to be removed for West Sub to reopen. She again called for a full investigation of operations at West Sub under his leadership. Osineme, who first spoke to reporters outside the intense press conference at West Sub last week with Prasad and State Rep. La Shawn Ford, said she had a follow-up meeting with Ford, Cong. Davis and State Rep. Camille Lilly last Saturday. She said she thought they heard more about community concerns and her focus on an investigation of the closing of three hospitals under the ownership of Pipeline Health, then Resilience Healthcare: Westlake Hospital, Weiss Memorial in Chicago and West Sub. “This is a pattern,” she said.