Mayors on both sides of the Illinois-Indiana state line said at a rally Friday they will fight plans by Franciscan Health to downsize a hospital that has been a fixture in Hammond for more than a century.
Franciscan recently announced plans to raze virtually all of the 250-bed hospital and build a new emergency room, eight-bed acute care hospital and primary care center on the site.
“This is just the beginning of this fight,” Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott told about 150 demonstrators outside the city’s police station.
They marched from there to the hospital, 5454 Hohman Ave., carrying signs with sayings such as “Save our hospital” and those accusing Franciscan of putting profits above patient care.
Franciscan also operates Indiana hospitals in Dyer, Michigan City and Munster and is building a hospital in Crown Point. It also operates a hospital in Olympia Fields.
Calumet City Mayor Thaddeus Jones said officials and residents would continue to protest and bring pressure to bear on the health care system “until they come to the table.”
“We have the communities behind us,” he said at the rally. “We will put the pressure on them.”
“I’m hoping they come to the table and talk,” McDermott said.
Franciscan said it is spending $45 million, with about $31 million of that going toward building a new, smaller facility, and in August will begin relocating patients to other hospitals.
The new building will also include dialysis services, prenatal care, lab services and inpatient care for short stays, according to Franciscan.
Plans for the hospital won’t affect operations at the neighboring Franciscan Health McAuley Clinic which provides health care to the underinsured, according to Franciscan.
Jones and McDermott said the plan to significantly downsize Franciscan’s presence in Hammond are reminiscent of a few years ago, when the health care system closed St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights.
Like the Hammond hospital, known for much of its life as St. Margaret or St. Margaret’s, St. James was a hulking, aging hospital that Franciscan said was costing far too much to maintain. Also, like St. James, Franciscan said that the need for inpatient beds at hospitals has decreased as more and more procedures are performed on an outpatient basis.
St. James had been a fixture and major employer in Chicago Heights before closing in early September 2018. With the closing came a multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion of Franciscan’s Olympia Fields hospital.
“They’re trying to do the same blueprint in Hammond,” Jones said.
McDermott described it as “the same playbook, different state.”
Jones said that many Calumet City residents rely on Franciscan’s Hammond hospital, but that he and other south suburban mayors were not notified by Franciscan of the plans.
McDermott said he was heading into a staff meeting and told the news before a hastily arranged news conference.
“I had one hour notice that one of our largest employers in the city of Hammond was shutting down,” he said.
Franciscan said that the downsizing will affect about 300 employees, although it expected that many of them could move into positions at other Franciscan hospitals.
Ravi Bhagwat, who has worked as a cardiologist at the Hammond hospital for 34 years, said he was unsure how many employees might find jobs. He is not directly employed by Franciscan.
“People are scared,” he said of employees.
Workers have formed deep bonds over the years, and “we will all be scattered,” Bhagwat said.
While he knows his job is secure at some other hospital, he knows that the impact on the city will be deep.
“I will survive, but I am not so sure about the people of Hammond,” Bhagwat said.
Many of the demonstrators were born at the hospital, had family members who were born there or otherwise have had some interaction with the hospital over the years.
Mary Janiga said she worked at the hospital as a nurse for 43 years in the labor and delivery unit. She said she was born there, as were her four daughters and two grandchildren, and that her mother died there.
The Hammond resident said that the hospital had always been very busy, at times having to go on bypass because there were not enough beds available.
“There were people in the ER waiting for beds,” Janiga said.
Although Franciscan will continue to have an emergency department in Hammond, she is concerned because trauma victims, once stabilized, will have to be transferred to other nearby hospitals.
“I worked there all those years and supported their mission,” she said of the faith-based health care system. “I feel they have abandoned their original mission here in Hammond.”
mnolan@southtownstar.com
