Provident Hospital will soon start accepting ambulances again — 11 years after the hospital stopped taking them — giving South Side residents another outlet for care.
The hospital will resume taking ambulances Wednesday, said Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, during a news conference Tuesday. Provident’s emergency room never closed, but it only accepted patients who arrived via car or foot.
Advertisement
Preckwinkle said more than $5 million was spent to get the emergency room back to a point where it could take ambulances again. Provident’s ER now gets about 19,000 patients a year, and expects that to grow by a few thousand when ambulance services resume, Cook County Health CEO Israel Rocha said.
Rocha said Tuesday he wasn’t sure why Provident stopped taking ambulances in the first place, but the expansion of Medicaid coverage to more people and the Affordable Care Act have helped make the resumption possible now.
Advertisement
“You have much more coverage, much more investment, and the community has grown, and you’ve also seen some hospitals close, so there is a need for the access, for services in the community,” Rocha said.
The resumption of ambulance services at Provident will give South Side residents more options for care and could help take some of the pressure off other area hospitals. Emergency departments across the region have been packed in recent months as patients address health issues that may have worsened during the pandemic and hospitals see more patients with mental health needs.
South Side residents and advocates have long decried a lack of enough medical services.
Bronzeville’s Mercy Hospital & Medical Center stopped taking ambulances last year amid discussions about closing the hospital. It didn’t resume taking ambulances for about a year, until after it was sold and became Insight Hospital & Medical Center Chicago. The situation, in some cases, contributed to other area hospitals becoming overwhelmed with patients arriving via ambulance.
University of Chicago Medical Center has long accepted ambulances, but didn’t become a Level I trauma center until 2018, after years of campaigning by community activists. Before then, the South Side had not had a trauma center for nearly 30 years, meaning victims of gun and knife violence and car wrecks sometimes had to travel as far as 10 miles for care.
Michael Reese Hospital in Bronzeville closed years ago.
Cook County Health had also planned to open a new eight-story hospital building for Provident in 2023, but was beset by a series of challenges including a CEO ouster and the pandemic. Now, amid higher construction costs, the system has put that project on pause while it expands other services at Provident and reassesses what a new building might consist of, Preckwinkle said.
