Plans are under way to relocate Select Specialty Hospital’s long term acute care services from Trinity Medical Center to Brookwood Medical Center. Administrators anticipate regulatory approval for the move in early 2015.
When Select Specialty moves its 38-bed operation to Brookwood, it will continue caring for chronically and critically ill patients in its hospital-within-a-hospital model. “We are a separate company and will have a separate staff from Brookwood,” says Andrea White, Chief Executive Officer of the Select Specialty Birmingham Hospital. “We will lease beds from Brookwood and will contract with them for services such as dietary, linens, radiology and laboratory services that are not feasible for us to do ourselves.”
A Long Term Acute Care Hospital (LTACH) cares for patients with serious conditions that require special treatment for an extended time, usually 25 or more days. These facilities offer more individualized and intensive care than a skilled nursing facility, nursing home or an acute rehabilitation facility. “Our main focus is our pulmonary program, primarily weaning patients off the ventilator,” White says. “For many critically ill patients, we are a post-ICU destination. These patients have a lot of complex medical problems, so in addition to vent weaning, many of them need services like dialysis, wound care, infectious disease and rehab.”
Select Specialty’s LTACH has been located within Trinity since 2001 and has served many patients in Alabama. White says the decision to move was a result of Trinity’s upcoming move to its new location on U.S. Highway 280 where it will become Grandview Medical Center. “We leased the space from Trinity, so we didn’t have a license for the beds. When their move was approved, Trinity said they would not have room for us in the new facility,” White says.
Select Specialty, which operates more than 110 LTACHs across the country, is going through the Certificate of Need (CON) process and has received opposition from Noland Health Services, another LTACH provider in the Birmingham area. As a result, Select Specialty went before an administrative law judge and is anticipating his ruling in time to get their request on the agenda for the January CON meeting. “We are optimistic we will have a good outcome,” White says.
In making her case, White points out that because patients from all over the state use Select Specialty’s LTACH, its elimination would leave only Noland to serve these severely ill patients. “We serve an average of 330 patients each year,” White says. “I’m not sure Noland could accommodate the increased volume if we no longer existed. Also, without our facility, patients would lose the ability to choose where they go for care. And we provide 125 jobs in the community using specially trained nurses and respiratory therapists.”
Stephen Preston, Vice President of External Affairs at Brookwood Medical Center, says their hospital has sent many patients to Select Specialty’s LTACH over the years and wants to keep these services in Birmingham. Brookwood has never had an LTACH facility on its property and saw this as an opportunity to provide continuation of these services within the community.
“Select Specialty has been in Birmingham for 13 years, and it would be a loss to the community if their services no longer existed,” Preston says. “Their special skills complement the services we provide at Brookwood Medical Center, so we made the commitment to lease 38 beds to Select Specialty for the LTACH. They will have a dedicated unit within our hospital. This is an important service that we already have in our state, and people come from as far north as Huntsville to use it. Our partnership with Select Specialty is not necessarily about what they bring to us, it’s about what would happen to very sick patients in our community and our state if their services are lost.”