RMCH seeing red
20 staff positions being eliminated

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — When Chuck Wright stepped down last December as CEO of the local county hospital, he was predicting that the hospital would end this year a couple of million dollars in the black.

But now, just two months later, the new administration at the Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital is reporting that they are in the red and are taking a number of actions to curtail expenses for the rest of the year. This includes eliminating 20 employee positions in the hospital from non-patient care departments.

Pat Wolfram, the hospital’s interim CEO, said at the end of January, the hospital was in the red after the first five months of the fiscal year by $875,802, caused by a $1.1 million loss for the month of January.

The hospital writes off $500,000 worth of bad debt every month, but in January had to write off $1.6 million. Hospital officials said this should have been written off in 2008 but was not.

Back in November, at least one member of the hospital’s board was complaining about Wright’s accounting, saying that some of his methods indicated that he was trying to manipulate the financial figures to show a more positive view of the hospital’s financial shape.

Ina Burmeister, the hospital’s public information officer, said no one is blaming Wright or anyone else for the current financial situation. Many hospitals are facing the same kinds of problems because of the current downturn in the economy. She called the laying off of the RMCH employees “right sizing,” and said that “it should have happened when dialysis went on their own.” She added that nobody in dietary, maintenance or housekeeping departments was affected by the layoffs.

“High rates of bad debts, higher number of uninsured patients, falling Medicaid and Medicare rates, longer delays in insurance payments and patients putting of elective procedures and non-emergency care are straining hospital finances,” a news release by the hospital said.

To turn the situation around, Wolfram has come up with several goals she plans to implement over the next three months:

• Reduce contract labor and overtime by 50 percent;

• Eliminate specific positions which are currently vacant;

• Put all 2009 annual pay raises on hold;

• Discontinue non-revenue producing services. One thing the hospital is doing, for example, is putting the cardiac rehab program, which is a separate program, in with the regular cardiac program, which would reduce staffing;

• Reduce operational expenses such as advertising;

• Implement new revenue producing programs.

Burmeister said the hospital has been trying to reduce the number of contract nurses because they are so expensive and hire their own nurses.

Last month, the hospital had managed to reduce the number of contract personnel to 16, which “was quite a lot lower than the number we had last fall,” she said. That resulted in a savings in January alone of $100,000, she said.

By taking these measures, Wolfram said she was optimistic that the hospital would be able to get back in the black by the end of the year.