'Sad day for Coalinga': Town's hospital to close, 200 employees to lose their jobs

Coalinga Regional Medical Center will close in June, the second district hospital in the central San Joaquin Valley to close in the past six months.

Tulare Regional Medical Center, a 112-bed hospital in Tulare, closed six months ago.

The Coalinga hospital board of directors voted Monday night to close the 24-bed hospital along with 99-bed skilled nursing beds, said CEO Wayne Allen.

The hospital employs about 200 people.

"It's a sad day for Coalinga. It's a very sad day for the community we serve," Allen said.

The closure will leave residents in the rural, western Fresno County city of 16,658 without an emergency room for 40 miles.

The nearest hospital to Coalinga is Adventist Health in Hanford, which is 40.8 miles away. The next closest hospitals — Kaweah Delta Medical Center in Visalia and Fresno Community Regional — are more than 60 miles away.

"It's going to be devastating,"Allen said. "And in some cases there's going to be a risk of a negative outcome on a particular medical condition that might develop."

About 70 patients in the hospital's skilled nursing facility will need to be transferred to nursing homes, "and it will be difficult" finding available beds for them, Allens said. "But we will have a safe and quality transfer for every one of those patients," he said.

Allen, who has experience in rescuing distressed hospitals, was hired less than a month ago to take the reins of the struggling Coalinga hospital after long-time CEO Sharon Spurgeon retired. The closure comes after 18 months of financial losses that total $4.5 million, he said.

Patient volume had declined at the hospital in the past year and a half, but Allen said he could not say why. "I've been here three weeks. I came in to do a turnaround and I'm doing a different type of turnaround with this situation now."

Rural hospitals all across the country are experiencing a change from providing inpatient services to outpatient care, Allen said. "The inpatient care in rural America is not financially sustainable."

The Coalinga hospital was established in 1938.

People in Coalinga were absorbing the news of the hospital closure Tuesday, said Mary Blyth Jones, owner of the Coalinga Press. "Some people say they can't live in the community without any medical support for acute care, for emergencies," she said.

Ron Lander, a barber and member of the Coalinga City Council, said one of his client's wives works at the hospital and said is talking about relocating out of the area. "This is a big, huge negative impact on our community," Lander said.

Allen said he is focused on a smooth closure of the hospital, but also is in discussions with Community Medical Centers, and with a couple of other hospital systems he said he could not name, about the possibility of offering outpatient care in Coalinga. "We've got to go in with the new business model of getting out of inpatient care and concentrating on outpatient care," he said.

This story was originally published May 1, 2018 at 4:01 PM with the headline "'Sad day for Coalinga': Town's hospital to close, 200 employees to lose their jobs."