Sutter promotes its Santa Rosa hospital plan

Sutter Health officials on Tuesday will give Santa Rosa city council members a preview of their plans to build a hospital just outside the northern city limits.

The preview comes a month before Sutter officials are expected to seek approval from the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors for a revised business plan that would outline how Sutter would deliver the public services it is obligated to provide through 2021.

The business plan is one phase a two-track system Sutter is moving forward with, said Sutter spokeswoman Lisa Amador. The other is an environmental study of a proposed 70-bed hospital and adjoining 28-bed surgery center next to the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts off Mark West Springs Road.

City leaders say they welcome the update on Sutter’s relocation plans and suspect hospital officials are hoping for a sign of support from the council. However, Amador said the goal of the presentations to the council and other community groups isn’t to garner support “but to educate them about our plans.”

Sutter’s relocation and down-sizing plans have been generating controversy, enough so that Councilwoman Jane Bender said, “I think they probably would like an endorsement from the council.”

Bender said the issue “is truly a county decision” because the proposed location is in the county’s jurisdiction.

Sutter’s current hospital, the aging 145-bed Sutter Medical Center off Chanate Road, is in the city. The high cost of meeting earthquake standards has pushed Sutter officials to investigate alternative sites, including the Wells Fargo property along Highway 101, a mile north of city limits and four miles from its Chanate Road location.

The hospital for decades was operated by the county, which leased it to Sutter Health of Sacramento in 1996 under a contract that requires Sutter to provide the county’s public medical care services through the year 2021.

The proposed medical center has drawn criticism from officials at a half-dozen hospitals scattered throughout Sonoma County that worry its reduced size, even below the proposed 118-bed facility Sutter abandoned in 2006, will give Sutter the power to better select the patients they admit, leaving the less profitable cases to other medical facilities.

Sutter, in financial filings required by the state, indicated it has lost $40 million operating the Chanate Road hospital between 2003 and 2007, a five-year period during which Santa Rosa’s 345-bed Memorial Hospital reported net income of $84 million.

Mayor Susan Gorin said she’s heard another issue cropping up “on the e-mail chatter.”

“It’s further away from the city’s population center and that might make it more difficult to get to the hospital,” she said.

Amador, however, said the criticism are off base.

“We are a not-for-profit hospital who takes care of people regardless of their ability to pay. We do not choose our patients. They come from clinics, are referred by doctors or come on their own,” she said.

Amador said locating next to Highway 101 “provides better access” to the hospital than does the current site amid residential neighborhoods.

Neither Gorin nor Bender said they see the smaller-sized facility as problematic, particularly in light of reports that four of every 10 beds at Sutter and Memorial are empty on a regular basis.

The 117-bed Kaiser Hospital in Santa Rosa, which has been rapidly expanding its client base over the past decade, reported a 73 percent occupancy rate.

“From my perspective, it’s a good project,” Bender said.