Illinois board rejects plans to close essential South Side Chicago hospital

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In a victory for health advocates and community members in Chicago, a review board has unanimously rejected a plan to shutter a safety-net hospital that would have likely worsened the medical desert on the city’s predominantly Black South Side.

The 6-0 decision came after activists rallied in support of Mercy, and after hours of often-emotional public comment Tuesday – including from the former Illinois governor Pat Quinn and a representative for the current governor, JB Pritzker – against Michigan-based Trinity Health’s plan to close the facility early next year, despite the pandemic.

“I do not believe that Mercy has made a reasonable case that [the closure] will not have an extremely negative impact on the South Side of Chicago,” Dr Linda Rae Murray, a member of the Illinois health facilities and services review board, said in voting against Trinity’s plan to shut down the hospital.

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“I am really distressed that this is going on in the midst of a global pandemic,” Murray added, calling the notion “unconscionable in my mind”.

Mercy, located in the historic Black neighborhood of Bronzeville, is the oldest hospital in Chicago, and serves a primarily Black, poor and elderly community – a population that has been especially hard hit by the coronavirus crisis.

Trinity, which operates hospitals nationwide, announced over the summer that it planned to close the facility in the first half of 2021 because it was not viable financially.

But healthcare advocates and community members were outraged, saying it would leave Black Chicagoans on the South Side with even fewer resources. “If this hospital closes, people will die,” Pastor Robert Jones said at a “Mercy Week” demonstration here last week, ahead of the review board meeting.

Community members and healthcare professionals continued to condemn the planned closure during the virtual board meeting Tuesday. “The [medical desert] would get drier” if Mercy closed, said Dr John Picken, a longtime obstetrician at the hospital.

“Mercy has been the only facility I have been able to go to,” one resident of the Dearborn Homes public housing in the neighborhood told the board. “If it was not for Mercy being there, I don’t know where I’d go.”

Trinity defended the plan, saying it “accounted for the pandemic” and that it was not “abandoning” the hospital, but “transforming” it to provide a “new model of care” for the community with an outpatient facility it said it would open later in 2021.

“The only path forward for Mercy hospital is transformation,” John Capasso, an executive vice-president at Trinity Health, said at the meeting.

But board members were skeptical of the plan. “I don’t see how this adds anything, to be honest with you,” said Murray. “This really does sound like just a closure.”

The threat to Mercy comes amid a rise of medical deserts across the country in rural areas and in cities. In places like Chicago, the trend has had a disproportionate impact on Black and brown communities.

Ahead of the vote, Debra Savage, the HFSRB chair, said she was “not convinced” the proposed outpatient center would be sufficient to fill the gap left by Mercy’s closure.

The ruling is a victory for those who say Mercy is a necessary resource in an underserved community. But there remains some uncertainty over the future of the hospital: Trinity has an opportunity to appear again before the board, and could argue its case in court if it still doesn’t get approval for the closure.