EDITORIAL: Hospital at critical point

The community should be very concerned about the future of South Coast Medical Center, the city’s hospital for some 50 years.

The hospital closed its maternity ward in April in an effort to save money, after determining the ward was losing $1 million a year. Instead of serving young families, the hospital’s direction would be in serving the growing older population.

While that seemed, at the time, like a sound business decision, the loss of a maternity ward in a hospital strikes deep at the heart of what a community hospital does.

It’s a very difficult economic climate for hospitals, which are squeezed with low insurance payments and, in California, the need to be seismically safe in case of a major earthquake.

South Coast Medical Center has had a long-term plan in place to replace its aging facility and build senior assisted living quarters as an adjunct business to keep it financially sound.

But that facility is a long way off and hospital officials have been blunt in telling city officials financial backing is key to the plan.

While the South Laguna hospital has been in decline, a new clinic opened up in Laguna Beach this year, and as one of our letter writers opines this week, small urgent care centers could be the wave of the future if a full-sized hospital facility is infeasible here.

While South Coast Medical Center has an emergency room, patients with serious trauma — especially from traffic accidents — are invariably transported to Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, which has a full-fledged trauma unit able to handle the most life-threatening injuries. Other excellent hospitals in nearby towns specialize in children or women’s medical problems.

In this climate of intense competition and faltering revenues, South Coast Medical Center has been trying to find its niche, with drug and alcohol dependency care, and, more recently, plastic surgery options, for which people with means are willing to pay.

Laguna Beach has been fighting to keep the hospital for years, and now it seems this fight has reached a critical point.

The City Council is apparently trying to address this issue in closed meetings that involve real estate negotiations, which are confidential by nature.

We will be waiting anxiously for the outcome of these negotiations, which could become public in September.