Keeping Palm Drive alive

Not long ago, Palm Drive Hospital was a place where sick west county residents were cared for, their vital signs meticulously monitored by doctors, nurses and technicians. Now, it’s the hospital itself that’s on life support, and Daymon Doss is the guy in charge of making sure the shuttered hospital doesn’t flat-line.

Doss, with the help of the hospital’s maintenance director, Clark Austin, and two housekeepers, walks the quiet, well-lit halls of the defunct hospital ensuring that all systems are fully operational. They lower the building’s vital functions - its electrical pulse, the breath and heat of its HVAC system, the flow of its fluids - as low as they can to both keep the building alive and minimize the use of energy.

Like other living things, this semi-dormant facility has to eat and breathe. If this were a sci-fi movie, Doss would be the android custodian of a spacecraft whose crew is in cryogenic stasis, ready to revive the facility when the time comes.

“It’s still a living, breathing hospital, and we keep it alive,” Doss said during a recent tour of the hospital. “We are reducing the direct support for all those services that were contracted by the hospital, and yet we want to keep operating certain systems in the hospital so that it remains viable should there be a pathway to reopening.”

In early June, Doss was named part-time executive director of Palm Drive Hospital, which filed for bankruptcy - the second time since 2007 - and closed its doors in April. You might ask, what does a hospital in stasis need an executive director for?

As Doss explains, his role of hospital custodian goes beyond keeping the hospital from falling into decay. Doss said one of his key duties is to help shepherd the Palm Drive Health Care District, which is in charge of the hospital, through bankruptcy proceedings. Doss said he hopes to have a restructuring plan in place by the end of the year.

That job includes reviewing all the hospital’s contracts with vendors and, to reduce costs, canceling those that are not deemed absolutely necessary.

Back in June, Doss canceled the hospital’s contract with Marin General Hospital for administration and financial support services, worth between $15,000 and $20,000 a month, and ended a contract for MRI services with General Electric worth $15,243 a month.

The MRI equipment, which cannot be shut down, is draining another $2,000 a month in electricity while the district waits for GE to pick it up.

During the months of May and June, Doss and the district “rejected” about 200 contracts with vendors totaling $455,000 a month.

“I am the person who has to make decisions at certain key points,” Doss said. “When we review contracts, someone has to decide whether to keep or reject them.”

Doss also is overseeing the process of evaluating formal proposals for bringing back health care services to the medical campus. The district has put out two proposal requests: one for the operation of an urgent care center or other medical services, and the other for the development and operation of an acute care hospital with an emergency room. Initial responses to both requests are due Aug. 25.

But the most tangible of his duties is keeping the facility from faltering until medical services can be brought back in one form or another.

Helping hospital districts in “transition” is what Doss does.

Doss, who many years ago started out his career in the health care business as a nurse, actually held his first hospital management position at Palm Drive Hospital in the early 1970s.

When Petaluma Valley Hospital was leased to St. Joseph Health in 1997, Doss became CEO of the Petaluma Health Care District. He held that job until 2011, when he retired and began his own consulting firm, Productivity Plus Systems, primarily focused on helping troubled health care districts.

Marsha Sue Lustig, president of the Palm Drive Hospital board, said she sees Doss as an “agent for change,” someone who has had experience helping districts through financial difficulties.

“He’s been around a number of years and has very good relations with health care providers in the area and outside,” Lustig said. “That will be very important if we’re lucky enough to hear from health care providers about our (proposal requests) that are currently out.”

Austin, the hospital’s maintenance director, and the two housekeepers are Palm Drive’s only full-time employees. Austin said the most important thing is to keep the air in the hospital circulating.

Periodically, Austin tests the hospital’s ventilation and air conditioning systems to make sure they’re working properly. About one-fifth of the building, where people still work, is kept air conditioned at about 70 degrees.

In areas that are not occupied and where medical equipment and supplies are stored, the heat is set to kick on at 65 degrees so that every part of the building gets some airflow. The building’s electrical heaters are turned off completely.

Austin frequently checks the emergency generator and the building’s lighting, fire suppression and water systems. Once a week he flushes all the toilets to prevent them from drying out.

The hospital’s systems, said Austin, can be categorized as either those the building needs to remain “healthy” or those needed by the hospital’s former medical staff. It is the latter, including X-ray equipment, the medical air compressor and vacuum pumps, that have been turned off, though they also are regularly tested.

“Treat it like a building that’s going to be around, and it will be,” Austin said. “Think about the 101 little things you do around the house without thinking about it.”

If and when the hospital finally does reopen, in whatever form that may be, the building systems will be the easiest to get back on track. With much of Palm Drive’s medical equipment consolidated and stored in locked rooms, the hospital’s medical systems would take longer to restore.

Austin estimated it would take about two months to fully reopen the hospital.

Doss said his “primary goal” is to reopen Palm Drive as an acute care hospital with an emergency department.

Based on conversations he’s had with local health care providers, there is stronger interest in bringing an urgent care center to the hospital. But the Palm Drive Health Care Foundation, which has long sought to reopen the facility as a full-service acute care hospital, continues to make improvements to its proposal, he said.

“We are working with them and giving them all the information they need so they can devise a workable model,” Doss said. “I am very encouraged by their ambition and their development.”

Until then, keeping the health care district’s only remaining patient healthy is priority No. 1, said Lustig, the hospital board president.

“We do see the hospital as a sort of patient or organism, and we need to take very good care of it so it’s ready when it reopens,” Lustig said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.