Last day for Crozer-Chester Medical Center, down to 20 patients, could be Friday.

A pregnant patient in active labor showed up Wednesday at Crozer-Chester Medical Center’s emergency department, minutes before the hospital was scheduled to close the unit, officials said during a bankruptcy hearing for owner Prospect Medical Holdings.

Delivering the baby was one of the last acts by Crozer-Chester’s emergency department staff. Mother and baby were quickly transferred to another hospital.

Prospect received bankruptcy court approval last week to close Crozer-Chester in Upland, which serves an area that does not have easily accessible healthcare alternatives. Prospect’s goal is to have all patients out of the hospital by Friday.

Twenty patients remained at Crozer-Chester as of Wednesday, Paul Rundell, Prospect’s chief restructuring officer, told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan. He described the remaining patients as difficult to move.

“They typically don’t have insurance, and they have complicated acuity diagnosis, and they’re difficult to place,” Rundell said.

Crozer-Chester had at least 220 patients last week when the closure process started. Prospect’s other remaining hospital in Delaware County, Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park, had just 30. All those patients were moved by the end of last week and the hospital has closed.

It‘s likely that many of the Crozer patients were discharged to home.

The next-closest hospitals have seen an immediate impact from Crozer’s wind down.

Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, which operates Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby, received eight transfers from Crozer over the last week.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System received 24 Crozer transfers since April 20, spread among five of its six Pennsylvania hospitals.

Main Line Health’s hospitals received 14 transfers from the two Crozer hospitals.

“More significantly, we are absorbing the volume from the community,” Main Line said.

It noted that at Riddle Hospital in Media, emergency department volumes are up by 40%. Additionally, Main Line has seen ambulance volumes from Chester double. Its surge units are full across all four of Main Line’s acute-care hospitals.

Both Crozer-Chester and Taylor started turning away ambulances last week, but remained open for walk-ins.

There were very few at Taylor, Suzanne Koenig, the patient care ombudsman overseeing safety at the hospitals since the January bankruptcy filing, said during the hearing.

More are expected to show up at Crozer-Chester. Prospect plans to have two ambulances stationed outside Crozer-Chester’s ED until the middle or end of next week to take people who need emergency care to other hospitals.

Melissa Van Eck, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office, told the judge that local officials want Prospect to pay for ambulances to remain for as long as 16 weeks.

In the first month after Prospect closed in 2022 the smaller Delaware County Memorial Hospital in Drexel Hill, “50 patients showed up at that facility outside of the ER needing transport,” Van Eck said.

“It‘s anticipated that the numbers [that] will come to Crozer will be much higher than that,” she said.

Prospect‘s attorney, Thomas R. Califano, said the for-profit company based in California has no money for more ambulance time in the wind-down budget for Crozer.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the number of transfers to Main Line Health.