Greene Memorial Hospital timeline
October 2008: Kettering Health Network purchases land for a medical campus near the Mall at Fairfield Commons in Beavercreek.
July 2009: Kettering Health Network stops offering inpatient maternity services.
August 2009: Kettering Health Network announces plans to build a 90-bed hospital in Beavercreek. Greg Henderson, then president of Greene Memorial Hospital, said about half of the 1,100 employees on Greene Memorial's campus — not all of them hospital employees — were expected to relocate to Beavercreek. Later that month, KHN CEO Frank Perez said he expected about 500 of the 576 hospital employees at Greene Memorial to stay at the Xenia hospital.
September 2011: A Kettering Health Network spokeswoman says staffing levels at Greene Memorial Hospital will be kept at that level.
November 2011: Greene County residents approve a 0.5-mill renewal levy for Greene Memorial Hospital by a vote of 31,287 to 19,820.
January 2012: Kettering Health Network announces Greene Memorial's inpatient psychiatric and rehabilitation units will close.
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XENIA — Kettering Health Network is shutting down inpatient psychiatric and rehabilitation services at Greene Memorial Hospital and signaled Thursday that further belt-tightening involving job cuts is imminent.
KHN is also discontinuing some outpatient services in Greene County, said Lori Turner, KHN’s vice president of market development and strategic communications.
Turner declined to say how many total jobs were affected by the closing of the psychiatric and rehabilitation units.
Future inpatient psychiatric admissions from the area will be directed to KHN’s Kettering Behavioral Medicine Center and Grandview Medical Center, she said.
In the first 11 months of 2011, Greene Memorial discharged 508 psychiatric patients and 187 rehabilitation patients.
KHN executives said the cuts are being made in anticipation of a “new reality” in health care.
“The new reality is that hospitals will be required to care for more patients with less reimbursement,” Fred Manchur, president and CEO of Kettering Health Network, said in a prepared statement. “Since we are in the business of health care for the long term, we are making adjustments now to ensure delivery of quality and excellence to our community.”
KHN said “additional realignments” will affect staff members, including nonclinical employees, starting in January. KHN declined to provide further details, but said affected employees will be reassigned within the network whenever possible.
Manchur said that KHN’s other hospitals — Kettering, Grandview, Southview and Sycamore medical centers, and Fort Hamilton Hospital — are “searching for opportunities to streamline and reduce expenses.” Turner declined to say if those expense reductions would include job cuts .
“Centralizing excellence is going to be a trend that we’re going to see,” she said.
KHN’s announcement Thursday comes two months after Greene County residents approved a 0.5-mill renewal levy for the hospital. Turner said that all services supported by the levy — emergency services, cancer care, cardiac care, stroke care and various support services — will still be offered at Greene Memorial.
In late September, a KHN spokeswoman told the Dayton Daily News there would be no staff reductions at Greene Memorial, even as Kettering Health Network prepares to open Soin Medical Center in nearby Beavercreek this February.
“The staffing that is there now (at Greene Memorial), they’re going to keep at that level,” KHN spokeswoman Elizabeth Long said then.
KHN said that statement was meant to indicate that jobs would not be moved from Greene Memorial Hospital to Soin Medical Center. KHN said the statement was not meant to indicate that Greene Memorial could not face job cuts due to economic conditions and its financial health.
Turner said Thursday that Greene Memorial’s financial situation “substantially worsened” during the latter part of 2011, and that leadership at the hospital had recently changed.
Greene Memorial saw its patient volume drop 13 percent between 2009 and 2011, while bad debt increased 30 percent, Turner said.
Greene Memorial had revenues of $83.6 million in 2010. The hospital lost about $3 million that year, according to a bond rating service.
In July 2009, the hospital stopped offering inpatient maternity services.
Xenia City Manager Jim Percival said Burns assured him Tuesday that the cutbacks at Greene Memorial “had nothing to do with the new hospital in Beavercreek.”
“Obviously, we’re concerned when there’s any loss of services to the community,” Percival said. “That is always a concern for us. We’re going to have to work with the hospital to make sure people in need of those services are taken care of.”
Some outpatient services in Greene County also will be relocated. Among the changes:
• Beavercreek Health Park on Kemp Road will stop offering occupational health and mammography services, and will close its free-standing surgery center. Turner said the surgery center’s volume was fewer than 10 per week.
• Greene Memorial Hospital’s Beaver View Health Center on Dayton-Xenia Road will close its Greene Hall outpatient services for addiction.
Kettering Health Network’s Beavercreek Health Center on Commons Boulevard will not be affected by the changes.
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