Crozer Health’s closure begins with emergency departments off-limits to ambulances

The emergency departments at Delaware County’s Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Taylor Hospital stopped accepting patients by ambulance Wednesday at 8 a.m., a key step in closing Delaware County’s largest health system.

Crozer’s owner, Prospect Medical Holdings, received bankruptcy court approval Tuesday to close the hospitals in an area that does not have easily accessible healthcare alternatives, especially for low-income residents of Chester who cannot drive to hospitals in Media, Darby, or Wilmington.

Crozer-Chester’s campus in Upland was quiet Wednesday morning, without ambulance traffic or sirens. Staff in scrubs trickled in slowly, along with the occasional patient.

The rumble of power tools and moving equipment broke up the quiet. A Postal Service truck hauled away a blue mailbox. Clean-out and demolition company trucks were parked in the roundabout outside the emergency department, normally busy with people dropping off or picking up patients.

A crew loaded up cardboard boxes, office chairs, and a wheelchair.

On Monday, when Prospect announced it would close Crozer after failing to find a buyer, the two hospitals stopped admitting patients for scheduled care. Halting admissions through the emergency departments brought them closer to emptying the hospitals.

The nearest alternatives to Crozer-Chester are Riddle Hospital in Media and Mercy Fitzgerald in Darby — both nearly 10 miles away.

Riddle officials said its emergency department saw a notable increase in patients Wednesday afternoon, as ambulances were diverted from Crozer-Chester.

Crozer-Chester had been seeing an average of 86 daily ED visits during the first three weeks of March, according to a court filing by the patient-care ombudsman monitoring Prospect’s hospitals for safety.

Main Line Health’s Riddle Hospital, by comparison, has been seeing 155 patients a day on average since Prospect closed Delaware County Memorial Hospital in late 2022.

By Wednesday afternoon, the Riddle emergency department parking lot was nearly full, and three ambulances were parked in the ambulance entrance area. One of the ambulances was from Boothwyn, a township in the southeasternmost corner of Delaware County, about 10 minutes from Crozer-Chester and twice as far from Riddle.

Transfers of patients who are expected to be hospitalized beyond Friday have already started, according to Shelly Buck, president of Riddle Hospital.

Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic’s Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby had a modest increase in ED visits, a spokesperson said.

Trinity’s St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington is also expected to pick up patients who otherwise would have been taken by ambulance to Crozer-Chester’s emergency department, which has Delaware County’s only trauma center.

Another concern is health services for women and babies, including high-level neonatal intensive care. Many of those patients are expected to end up at nearby hospitals operated by Main Line Health, including Riddle.

Crozer will begin laying off 2,651 workers Friday, Prospect notified state regulators in documents made publicly available Tuesday.

At a rally Tuesday outside Crozer-Chester organized by a union that represents nurses, paramedics, and others at Crozer, employees decried the loss of the hospital system, which traces its roots to the Civil War.

“We will be here until the last patient leaves and they lock us out,” said Peggy Malone, president of the Crozer-Chester Nurses Association.

Hospital management told employees that starting Wednesday they “will be required to follow the same protocol currently followed by visitors when entering our facilities.”

The loss of services goes beyond the hospitals.

Glenolden resident Kathy Rich, who broke her ankle in three places in February, learned Monday that the Crozer physical therapy office in Springfield she uses is closing Friday. “I left there crying,” she said.

Her insurance required her to use Crozer physical therapy, so she had to go back and forth with Keystone Health Plan East about switching to a new physical therapy company. She is still on crutches and has weeks of physical therapy to go.

» READ MORE: Crozer patients in limbo

A for-profit company based in California, Prospect acquired Crozer in 2016 in a deal valued at $300 million. Since then, it has shut down two other Crozer hospitals, reduced medical services, and laid off employees in several rounds of cutbacks.

Prospect also saddled Crozer with liabilities, which factored into the failure of a state proposal to get local health systems involved in a new independent nonprofit to own it.

After Prospect filed for bankruptcy protection in January, three rounds of funding — totaling about $40 million from the state, Delaware County, and the Foundation for Delaware County — kept Crozer going under the oversight of FTI Consulting, a management firm picked by the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.

Both Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Attorney General Dave Sunday have pledged to do what they can to hold Prospect accountable for the financial and health service losses at Crozer as Prospect’s bankruptcy grinds on.

Crozer’s closure has left local officials scrambling to address looming gaps in services long provided by the health system, including its EMS support for more than a dozen Delaware County municipalities.

Crozer’s EMS services will not fully terminate until May 2, and they could be extended longer under procedures approved Tuesday by a bankruptcy judge in Texas.

Upper Darby Township hired STAT EMS Medical Transport, based in Drexel Hill, to provide EMS services starting Monday, Mayor Edward Brown said in a statement.

Another significant concern is the loss of Crozer’s labor and delivery services, as well as its high-level neonatal intensive-care unit. FTI Consulting was working on a transfer of the Chester hospital’s labor and delivery services to Riddle before its role at Crozer ended last week.

That remains a work in progress. Riddle held an open house last week for Crozer ob-gyns and is trying to recruit 10 of them to come to Riddle, Buck said. Some Crozer patients already have come to Riddle to give birth or have scheduled C-sections, she said.

Another uncertainty is the fate of Crozer’s outpatient facilities in Broomall, Glen Mills, Havertown, and Media. Crozer leases all of those facilities.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System had a preliminary agreement to pay $5 million and assume the leases at Broomall and Glen Mills, but that deal fell apart after Prospect realized it would not get the $5 million until the transfer was complete.

Prospect also learned that other local health systems were interested in taking over the outpatient sites, so it decided to put them up for auction. Under a plan approved by the bankruptcy judge, initial bids are due by noon Friday. If there is more than one bidder, an auction is scheduled for Tuesday at noon.