Lakewood Mayor Summers Answers Hospital Questions on Facebook

LAKEWOOD, OH — Many voters in Lakewood have questions regarding the closing of Lakewood Hospital and the construction of the new Family Health Center with Issue 64 on the ballot.

The Lakewood Community Facebook Page has been hosting an ongoing Q&A with Lakewood Mayor Summers, saying they will take any question from residents and submit them to Mayor Summers.

Last week, the page took a question from Lakewood resident Anne Louise Klein. Ms. Klein asks why the mayor feels that Lakewood no longer needs a hospital.

A brand new and very timely Summers' Time with Mayor Michael P. Summers.

I hope people will see from this question submitted by Anne Louise Klein (she okayed me using her name) that we do not hand pick questions. Ask and the mayor shall answer.

Here we go:

Ms. Klein: "my question for the mayor is this: just why he feels the residents of this city don't need a hospital??? We all have been thrown under the bus."

Mayor Summers: "A fair question. If asked the simple question “Would you prefer a hospital or not?” virtually everyone, including me, would agree that a strong, viable very local hospital is preferable to not having one.

The question I faced wasn’t nearly that simple, and in fact the hospital trustees and I were obligated to answer several more questions. Among them: Who will fund the hospital? And who will be its doctors and its patients? The answers to these questions were the challenges facing Lakewood hospital’s future.

The question sounds like many others I’ve encountered from residents trying to “save” Lakewood Hospital. Their narrative has been along the lines of:

1. everything was fine at Lakewood Hospital;
2. healthcare is not changing;
3. the hospital is a public hospital; and
4. the hospital trustees and I negligently ceded the interests of our community to Cleveland Clinic’s interests.

But none of the four points raised above is true. When I arrived as mayor in January 2011, I quickly assessed several major external forces working against our city. One of them was the long-term viability of Lakewood Hospital and the peril of it failing, which I came to appreciate as a hospital trustee. It had lost millions of dollars in each of the years 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. Admissions continued to decrease. The trustees’ strategic adjustments under the Vision for Tomorrow plan had just been implemented, but many of them were outpatient-based such as brain health for geriatric patients and diabetes care for an increasingly diabetic population. The narrative that everything was fine at the hospital just is not accurate.

Healthcare was then and is now changing seismically. Healthcare experts uniformly agree that the rate of change on our ability to diagnose and treat disease and repair broken bodies is exponential and unrivaled compared to past medical eras. Most of these changes favor treatment that is less invasive and requires little or no overnight stays. This is very good for patients, but very financially challenging for hospitals.

Lakewood Hospital ceased to be a public hospital by an overwhelming majority vote of our citizens in 1985. This shift was propelled by a recognition that healthcare was changing substantially then as well, and the ability of a public hospital to change and finance itself was very limited. From that moment to now, no taxpayer money was invested or spent in support of Lakewood Hospital. The resources of the Lakewood Hospital Association, the governing body of the private, nonprofit hospital, are not public funds. Because of the complicated contractual relationships between the city (as the landlord) and the hospital trustees (as the tenant), and between the trustees and the Cleveland Clinic (as the day-to-day operator), many residents still hold to the notion that Lakewood Hospital was public. It simply wasn’t.

In light of the above, the hospital trustees sought independent, expert advice on the future of healthcare in our community: its needs, its current capabilities, its local market competitiveness, its current capacity, a forecast of its future capacity, technological impacts, regulatory impacts (specifically the Affordable Care Act shift from paying for service to paying for outcomes and getting healthier. The trustees spent almost three years, from 2012 to 2014, studying, assessing and ultimately deciding the direction of investing the hospital’s dwindling resources. The trustees desired to make an investment in healthcare that, first and foremost, better met the health needs of the communities served by the hospital, both today and years from now; and second, was aligned with marketplace forces sufficiently that the operation would remain financially viable for years to come. The trustees included in their search many potential strategic partners in addition to the Cleveland Clinic, but ultimately no other strategic partners emerged from this search.

In January of 2015, the hospital trustees presented their proposal to Lakewood City Council for public consideration. It is well documented that City Council spent over 50 meetings listening to, considering and addressing community concerns, including those from members of the Save Lakewood Hospital organization. City council employed independent legal and healthcare advisers, each of whom ultimately helped to affirm the trends underlying the hospital trustees’ recommendations and rigorously negotiate a fair deal for Lakewood’s residents.

On Dec. 21, 2015, City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance that revised several contracts to allow for the transformation and investment in the new primary care, outpatient-based center with an attached emergency department — all paid for by Cleveland Clinic. The deal also calls for creating and funding a $32 million community wellness foundation, provides $20 million in cash to the city, and funds infrastructure costs, liability costs and other wind down costs associated with closing a hospital and transferring employees and tenants.

This is, of course, a very condensed version of a very complex story. My role as mayor was to address this situation head-on — not to duck it, not to postpone it, and not to blame someone else. It remains my responsibility to make sure we provide real solutions to real problems, as uncomfortable and unpopular as they might be.

I offer this narrative as an alternative to the misconceptions presented by others, and I hope it helps to answer the question above.

Photo by Rick Uldricks/Patch