Local ERs see rise in patients after Delaware County Memorial Hospital closure

Emergency departments closest to the shuttered Delaware County Memorial Hospital have seen patient increases of up to 20% since Pennsylvania regulators ordered Crozer Health to close the Upper Darby hospital on Monday morning because of inadequate staffing.

But one local hospital official said emergency department visits are up everywhere, making it hard to judge the specific impact of the Delaware County Memorial closure.

“Our volumes at all of our campuses are up about 20%, including our Paoli campus, so there’s definitely an impact that’s going on right now with RSV [a respiratory virus] and with flu that’s starting to hit our local ERs,” Jonathan Stallkamp, chief medical officer for Main Line Health, said Friday. Paoli Hospital is too far away to pick up Delaware County Memorial patients, and Riddle, in Media, has seen few patients from the area around Upper Darby, he said.

Stallkamp estimated that the Main Line’s Bryn Mawr Hospital and Lankenau Medical Center, in Wynnewood, are each seeing 15 to 30 additional patients a day from the area that was serviced primarily by Delaware County Memorial.

Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby, about two miles away from Delaware County Memorial, has seen a roughly 20% increase in emergency department visits, or about 20 patients a day, said Mary Wascavage, a spokesperson for owner Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic.

Crozer Health, which owns Delaware County Memorial, said Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park had seen a 15% to 20% increase in visits. The increase at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland has been in the range of 5% to 8%, a Crozer spokesperson Lori Bookbinder said.

In its last week of operation, the Delaware County Memorial emergency department saw an average of 55 patients a day, Bookbinder said.

Crozer, owned by Los Angeles-based Prospect Medical Holdings Inc., chipped away at services offered at Delaware County Memorial this year, ending maternity care in January and closing intensive care in May.

Even before the plan to turn Delaware County Memorial into a psychiatric and drug treatment facility was announced on Sept. 21, some feared that Prospect would reduce services there until the state Department of Health was forced to shut it down.

That’s exactly what happened, when regulators said Nov. 4 that the emergency department had to close Nov. 7 because the hospital no longer had staff for X-rays and other medical imaging. Hospital admissions were also suspended.

Most of the radiology technicians left Delaware County Memorial after Crozer announced on Sept. 21 that it planned to close the hospital late this month, according to the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals.

Elected officials in Delaware County were critical of state officials for issuing the order.

“That order gives Prospect exactly what it wants,” said State Rep. Mike Zabel, a Democrat who represents Drexel Hill.

“It was always their goal to close Delaware County Memorial,” he said of Prospect, which in 2016 acquired Crozer-Keystone Health System in a deal valued at $300 million.

Zabel and seven other members of the General Assembly in a letter Monday urged the Wolf administration to suspend the health department order and allow the fight over the hospital’s future to play out in court.

The Foundation for Delaware County, which represents the interests of Crozer-Keystone, on Oct. 11 won a preliminary injunction in the Court of Common Pleas temporarily blocking Prospect from altering services at the hospital. That order was upheld Nov. 2. The foundation is trying to enforce a provision of the sale agreement that required Prospect to keep Delaware County Memorial open until 2026.

In the meantime, Prospect appealed the preliminary injunction to Commonwealth Court, and the foundation is weighing its next move.