South County Hospital needs help
By Will Collette
South County’s two non-profit hospitals have bracketed
hospital ratings for safety and effectiveness over the past couple of decades,
one usually ranked at or near the top, the other at or near the bottom.
When Cathy and I returned to Rhode Island in 2001, it was
South County Hospital with the great scores and Westerly Hospital with the poor
ones. That
changed about ten years ago.
In 2012, Westerly
Hospital was on the brink of shutting down, having run out of money with a
management that had run out of ideas. They were saved, barely, when they were
purchased by Lawrence & Memorial Hospital of New London. L&M management
brutally
cut staff and services at Westerly, while also engaged in a bitter
strike with their own employees in New London.
However, in 2016, the dynamic changed when both Lawrence
& Memorial and Westerly Hospitals were bought
out by Yale-New Haven as Yale brought higher standards to both hospitals.
By contrast, South County Hospital remained Rhode Island’s
only independent hospital, for better or worse, and also recently went through
its own corporate turmoil that broke into the open in summer 2024.
My own personal connection to South County Hospital goes
back more than 50 years. As a young strategic researcher, I worked on a
statewide campaign led by former RI AFL-CIO President George Nee to get every
hospital in Rhode Island to help uninsured and unemployed workers by treating
them regardless of ability to pay and to write off a substantial amount of
medical debt. Each hospital in turn was targeted until they agreed to these
terms.
 |
| Donald Ford |
I went and discovered a new friend, if not a kindred spirit.
As we walked through the whole hospital, especially the inner sections rarely
seen by visitors, Donald greeted workers and often patients by name. He ran the
hospital that way for almost 30 years. I mourned
his passing in 2010.
Fast forward to the present and we have a new South County
CEO, Aaron Robinson who took over as boss in 2018. His policies and management
style provoked a staff revolt, mass resignations, a sharp decline in South County’s ratings and community protests demanding his resignation.
Robinson responded by adopting a siege mentality and, in a
move I’ve never seen, filed a punitive SLAPP suit against the community opposition
group “Save South County Hospital.” SLAPP suits are illegal under Rhode Island law.
Whether it was the SLAPP suit or some genuine compromise,
South County management and its angry constituents came to some kind of undisclosed compromise, but not in time to prevent South County Hospital’s
safety score from dropping another letter grade.
One of the few details of the settlement acknowledged by both sides was that South County would seek and secure some sort of "partnership" deal with an undisclosed third party that would boost quality through more investment yet also preserve SCH's independence.
I asked several SCH staff at various levels about this secret deal, and they said they were waiting to see what Robinson had in mind.
Meanwhile, under Yale-Haven, Westerly Hospital continues to show marked improvement as their scores over the past several years shows.
If you open up the FULL REPORT, you can see where South County has fallen short. I was especially concerned about the two tables above. My interpretation of this data is that safety standards certainly appear to have slipped, but it doesn't seem to be the staff's fault.
Non-profit hospitals should be a public trust. That's what Donald Ford told me almost 50 years ago. Today, they are more like businesses, and their leaders resemble Wall Street CEOs rather than Main Street civic leaders. While I harbor no false hopes about any return to the good old days, there must be a way rekindle the bond between the public and these once revered institutions.
