Memorial Hospital of Gardena is for sale, its owners have confirmed, but the small medical center is not in the same dire situation as other local hospitals put on the market in recent times.
Healthplus Corp., the Houston-based owner of Memorial of Gardena and another small hospital in East Los Angeles, is trying to sell the two properties because they are doing well and thus should attract potential buyers, Memorial’s chief administrator said.
That’s unlike Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne, which closed last year for lack of a buyer, and two hospitals in Inglewood and one in Marina del Rey that were put on the market last year by a massive company hurriedly trying to divest itself of 27 California hospitals.
There is no imminent transaction and no discussions with potential buyers are going on at the moment, said Memorial Hospital of Gardena Administrator Steve Popkin. It is not a fire sale, he said.
“It’s actually because the hospitals are doing well from a financial standpoint and it’s an opportunity for the owners of Healthplus.”
Past sales of the 173-bed hospital have not resulted in any interruption of service.
In 1999, Healthplus purchased Memorial of Gardena and the 127- bed East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital from Foundation Health System. According to county property records, the price for Memorial was $13.25 million.
In 1992, Foundation Health became the owner of the two hospitals by acquiring Century MediCorp, which bought the Gardena hospital the year before in a $6.7 million deal.
The hospital was built in 1966 on a property of slightly less than 4 acres.
Hospital sales can cause concern in Los Angeles County, which has been severely hit in recent years by the closure of hospitals and their emergency rooms.
In January 2004, the region was set on edge by the announcement from giant Tenet Healthcare that it would sell 27 of its California hospitals, including Inglewood’s Centinela Hospital and Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, and Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital near Marina del Rey.
A investment group stepped forward and in September announced it would buy those three hospitals and make them into the “Centinela Freeman Regional Medical Center,” a network of the three campuses.
But shortly after that, RFK Medical Center in Hawthorne, which had been struggling with a lack of inpatient volume, announced it would close by year’s end if there was no last-minute purchaser.
When RFK closed in December, emergency room traffic at neighboring hospitals immediately went up. For Memorial of Gardena, it went up about 15 percent, further crowding the hospital’s small emergency department.
In addition, the county hospital in nearby Willowbrook, Martin Luther King Jr.-Drew Medical Center, closed its trauma center this year. Although its emergency room remains open, local hospital officials believe more patients are avoiding King-Drew.
In 2003, Memorial of Gardena’s 10-bed emergency department handled 17,000 patients, which included about 3,500 ambulance- transported cases, according to county Emergency Medical Services Agency data.
Because it is a small hospital serving the inner city, Memorial qualifies to be one of only seven in the county that has a set service area, which is supposed to limit the number of patients it receives from ambulances.
In an effort to keep the ER open at Memorial of Gardena, the same service area protection likely would be extended to the new owner, said Carol Meyer, county EMSA director.
“Having lost RFK and with all the issues at MLK, they are critical,” Meyer said of Memorial of Gardena.
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