Bakersfield Memorial proposes new children's medical center
| Wednesday, Sep 16 2009 07:45 PM
Last Updated Friday, Sep 18 2009 01:42 PM
There are four components to Bakersfield Memorial Hospital's proposed Children's Medical Center:
Neonatal intensive care unit
This facility was recently reopened following an expansion from 12 beds to 19. It functions alongside an intermediate level nursery that holds 12 additional patients.
Pediatric intensive care unit
This eight-bed unit would be the first in the southern San Joaquin Valley. It is expected to open in summer 2010 at a cost of $881,000.
Expanded pediatric inpatient department
Memorial's existing pediatric inpatient department would grow from 12 to 22 acute pediatric beds at a cost of about $2 million. It would not open for another two years or more.
Outpatient clinics
These on-campus facilities would provide specialties such as pediatric cardiology and pediatric endocrinology. They would also include a high-risk infant follow-up clinic to track NICU patients after discharge.
Source: Bakersfield Memorial Hospital
Images:
Henry A. Barrios / The Californian Dr. Madhu Bhogal, right, visits with Gabby Jordan, left, and her 3-day-old baby girl, Amerie Guerrero, as the baby receives light therapy in Bakersfield Memorial Hospital's NICU.
Henry A. Barrios / The Californian Gabby Jordan touches her 3-day-old baby girl, Amerie Guerrero, as the baby receives light therapy in Bakersfield Memorial Hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. Bakersfield Memorial Hospital is planning to open a children's medical center, a hospital within a hospital, next year.
Kern's sickest children would get quick access to expert medical attention under a plan to build the county's first pediatric intensive care unit, part of a proposed children's medical center at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital.
The $3 million project -- two-thirds funded by the hospital, the rest by donations -- would go beyond the proposed eight-bed intensive care unit to include an expanded pediatric inpatient department as well as outpatient clinics offering specialized services in short supply locally. The "hospital within a hospital" would complement Memorial's recently expanded neonatal intensive care unit.
If the phased development secures the necessary donations and state approvals, it would further a specialization trend among hospitals, and could position nonprofit Memorial to capture a greater share of state health-care dollars.
Hospital officials said the idea for a children's hospital was born about three years ago when a local girl's fall off a horse caused her brain to bleed. Her surgeon said there was no time to fly her to a children's hospital in Los Angeles or Madera, so medical professionals worked to save her life inside Memorial's adult intensive care unit. They succeeded.
"That's when we said, 'OK, this is something we have to do,'" Jon Van Boening, Memorial's president and CEO, said Wednesday.
Bakersfield pediatrician Dr. Chuck Lee said the idea is "long overdue," adding that parents suffer great anxiety -- not to mention the potential harm to patients -- when seriously ill children must be flown from Bakersfield to the Fresno and L.A. areas.
"Every minute counts," he said.
Others noted that out-of-town medical care can be a huge expense and inconvenience for families that must take time away from work and home to go see their children in a hospital.
Various challenges
The plan carries with it special challenges, among them financial and regulatory hurdles, as well as a local shortage of certain medical specialists.
Memorial hopes to address the latter by working with Children's Hospital of Los Angeles Medical Group to help with training and recruitment.
"They (specialists) are out there. It's just (a matter of) recruiting them to come over into Bakersfield," said Georgina Manning, Memorial's nurse director for maternal-child health services.
Hospital officials downplay the plan's financial uncertainties. Van Boening said he does not expect the new medical center to make money for three to four years. He said profit is not a driving concern.
"The hospital's doing this as a community service," he said, adding that the hospital's board of directors approved the project 18 months ago.
Others said raising the community's roughly $1 million share of the total cost could be difficult but that local donors have always come through.
"We're too big of a city to not have a better approach and a better facility for our youngsters," said Rogers Brandon, a local businessman and board member of Memorial's fundraising foundation.
The new medical center would need to be inspected physically by state regulators. In addition, the hospital must receive certain licenses from the California Department of Health, which would examine things like staffing levels and policies, a process spokesman Ralph Montano called a "very thorough process." He declined to estimate how long the approval process could take, saying each case is unique.
Hospitals in Bakersfield and across the country are increasingly turning to specialized services, said Lynne Ashbeck, regional vice president for the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California. The move is typically strategic in a financial sense, she said.
"It is one way that hospitals can respond to the marketplace, which is difficult for hospitals on a good day," she said.
As specialties go, children's hospitals may be particularly promising financially, said Washington health-care consultant Peter Harbage, who noted that recent state ballot measures have proposed setting aside money for children's hospitals.
Such medical centers also tend to get a large share of their money from the state's Medi-Cal and Healthy Families health coverage programs, he said.
The medical center could ultimately draw young patients away from the county-owned hospital, Kern Medical Center, Harbage added.
KMC President and CEO Paul Hensler declined to comment, saying he was unfamiliar with the specifics of Memorials' plans.
Bakersfield Ronald McDonald House, which opened over the summer on the campus of Bakersfield Memorial, could provide food and lodging to loved ones of young patients in town for medical treatment.
