The village of Oak Park shut down the West Suburban Medical Center building Thursday, after the hospital’s last functioning elevator stopped working — forcing the remaining patients there to find care elsewhere.
Village officials made the decision to close the facility after firefighters were called to help patients who were stranded on upper floors, said Erik Jacobsen, a spokesperson for the village.
Though the owner of the company that operates West Suburban abruptly closed the hospital in March, some providers that were not part of the hospital’s operations had still been using the building.
A dialysis clinic that saw about 140 patients a week on the fifth floor of the hospital’s professional building had continued to operate, and PCC Community Wellness Center had continued to run three clinics there.
They left Thursday after Oak Park closed the building to the public. The only people allowed in the building now are security and maintenance workers, Jacobsen said.
“We’ve basically been scrambling to move 140 patients,” said Dr. George Naratadam, a nephrologist at West Suburban. “They can’t really miss dialysis or they could die.”
Dialysis patients now have to go to different dialysis sites in the area, but those locations may be farther from their homes and they may not be able to get in at their usual times, Naratadam said. Patients must typically undergo dialysis three times a week for four hours at a time.
“Basically with this emergency situation, we don’t really have a choice. We have to get them to wherever they have openings,” Naratadam said.
PCC has also been working to move its providers and patients to other sites, said Dr. Paul Luning, chief medical officer at PCC. The center had two primary care clinics and an OB-GYN practice at West Suburban, in addition to other locations.
“It’s a very difficult situation for patients and for us because PCC is a federally qualified health center,” Luning said. Federally qualified health centers get federal dollars to help them care for underserved communities.
“We’ve been here for 35 years and we exist to serve the West Side of Chicago, but if we can’t have patients seen in our offices then obviously its significantly decreases their access to care,” Luning said.
Attempts to reach representatives for Dr. Manoj Prasad, whose company Resilience Healthcare operates the hospital, and his business partner and landlord, Reddy Rathnaker Patlola, were not immediately successful Friday afternoon.
The village of Oak Park is requiring that at least two of the hospital’s elevators work and pass inspection before it will allow the building to reopen to the public, Jacobsen said.
Prasad had said in April that he was restarting some outpatient services at the hospital as part of a plan to reopen the hospital in phases this summer. It wasn’t clear Friday if those services were also interrupted.
The breakdown of the hospital’s last elevator follows months of tumult involving the facility.
Prasad closed the hospital in March, citing billing problems that he said had left the hospital too short on cash to run.
Lawsuits soon followed, with Prasad’s company Resilience Healthcare and landlord Patlola’s company Ramco Healthcare Holdings suing one another. Ramco had filed an emergency motion to appoint a receiver so that a new operator could be put in place, but a Cook County Circuit Court judge denied that request earlier this month.
Judge Patrick Stanton said at the time that a plan was in the works to potentially reopen the hospital. A hearing in the case is scheduled for June 22.
