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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Full EIR for Hospital May Cost Lives

On July 26, the Los Angeles City Planning Commission unanimously approved a 136-bed addition to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, which has the second busiest private trauma center in the county and operates at above capacity nearly every day due to the region’s demands for services and recent closures of nearby hospitals. In the past four years, our emergency room volume has nearly doubled, from 30,000 visits in 2003 to an estimated 52,000 this year. On a typical day, we are holding 10 to 20 emergency patients in temporary spaces and hallways because there are no open inpatient beds. Despite the unanimous support from the Planning Commission and the Mission Hills Neighborhood Council for our project, with the existing mitigation measures put in place to protect the environment, an appeal has been filed. Adding 101 new beds, with the capacity for an additional 35, the expansion will provide some relief and add services to our community. Our plans include adding a 12-bed neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), which will be the first in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. One of the reasons this new unit is extremely important is because a majority of the women who welcome their new babies in our hospital are Latina and many are diabetic. Frequently, the newborns of diabetic mothers are born premature, and we must transfer the babies to a hospital with an NICU, separating the baby and mother soon after birth. Family members must then travel far from their homes to visit their loved one, causing additional stress. By moving our labor & delivery and new post-partum suites into the new South Addition, we will be able to expand our surgery department and our intensive care unit in the existing Medical Center. The expansion of these services is vital because many of our trauma and emergency patients are critical, and require surgery and intensive care. The $146 million expansion will also be good for the economy. The project will provide an estimated $64 million in labor jobs, including 171 construction jobs during the project’s peak period. Once completed, the South Addition will provide 250 new full-time and quality jobs. Providence Holy Cross is one of the Northeast San Fernando Valley’s major employers, providing competitive wages that average $36 an hour. Additionally, we are following the City’s call to “be green,” and our goal is to build California’s first “green” hospital in Los Angeles. Throughout the planning process, we have followed the City’s requirements, including taking measures to ensure the mitigation of all potential environmental impacts to a level of insignificance. The appellants have requested that we complete a full Environmental Impact Report, but such a report would provide no additional information or protections beyond the document that we have already completed. Instead, it will only slow down the expansion project by two years. While a two-year delay will increase project costs by an estimated $40 million, the real cost of any delay is the loss of lives. Every month this project is delayed increases the chances that our community will not be prepared in the event of a natural disaster, pandemic flu or bioterrorist event. Every month this project is delayed, the bed capacity issues at Providence Holy Cross will force trauma victims to more distant trauma centers, thereby decreasing their chances for survival. We urge the Los Angeles City Council to follow the recommendations of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission and our Mission Hills community and approve the expansion project NOW. Kerry Carmody is an administrator at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center.

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