A hearing to consider the City of Hammond’s move to stop the closure of Franciscan Health Hammond’s emergency room was delayed until Wednesday.
On Monday afternoon, Hammond officials filed a temporary restraining order against Franciscan Alliance in response to the November announcement that Franciscan Health Hammond would be closing its emergency department by the end of the year.
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A preliminary injunction by the city to extend the temporary restraining order, which typically lasts 10 days, was originally set to be heard by Lake County Superior Court Civil Division Judge Bruce Parent on Tuesday afternoon, but the hearing was postponed until 9 a.m. Wednesday in order to give both parties time to gather evidence.
Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott has been outspoken in his criticism of Franciscan’s decision to close its inpatient and emergency room services, claiming the hospital’s managing staff promised to maintain its presence in the city.
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“The purpose (of the TRO) is to get the emergency room open as promised a year and a half ago by Franciscan’s Hammond campus CEO … and their assurances ever since that the emergency room was going to stay open,” McDermott said in an interview with the Post-Tribune.
Franciscan Health Hammond, formerly St. Margaret Hospital, has been the city’s primary health care provider for more than 120 years, but announced it would be transferring its services to Franciscan Health’s Dyer and Munster campuses due to dwindling patient numbers and staffing shortages, Franciscan Health Hammond, Dyer and Munster Interim President and CEO Barbara Anderson said in a Nov. 3 news release.
“There was an announcement of Franciscan’s plans at the time, but plans change,” Robert Anderson, legal counselor to Franciscan Alliance, said.
Franciscan lawyers claim it is too late to reverse course no matter what the court decides on Wednesday, as personnel and equipment have been transferred to its other campuses.
“Franciscan believes that concentrating hospital resources in a few number of of locations better enables it to provide high quality, state of the art care to everybody,” Robert Anderson said.
While the Hammond campus’s emergency rooms will remain in operation till the end of the year, Franciscan announced ambulances will no longer deliver patients to its Hammond location staring at 6 a.m. on Dec. 23.
“This notion that the hospital has to be in Hammond in order to prevent people from dying is not true … there are a lot of communities in northwest Indiana that don’t have a hospital within their municipal boundary,” Robert Anderson said.
The hospital’s emergency room closure is not the only grievance the city has with Franciscan, the timing and lack of communication prior to the November announcement left Hammond officials blindsided according to McDermott.
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“We could have been shopping that location to competitors of Franciscan, to people that would be interested in keeping the ER open, but Franciscan doesn’t want us to do that because they want the hospital to close and nobody to take its place because they’re greedy,” he said.
Hammond officials hopes the restraining order will extend Franciscan Health Hammond’s services for another year and a half, which is hopefully enough time to find an alternative emergency health care provider in the area.
“I don’t think anybody is more disappointed that Franciscan can no longer offer these services in Hammond than the (Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration) are,” Robert Anderson said. “On the other hand, the whole premise of this litigation is that somehow Franciscan promised the city of Hammond that it would keep the emergency department open, and now the city of Hammond thinks that the court should make them keep it open forever.”
gwiebe@chicagotribune.com
