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Activists, medical professionals and members of the community in Chicago have warned that the closure of Mercy Hospital – the city’s oldest healthcare facility, and one of its oldest – is likely to lead to a sharp rise in ethnic health issues in the city.
Trinity Health, which has owned the facility for eight years, plans to shut it down this winter or early spring, citing financial struggles. But organizers here say its closure, especially against the backdrop of the Covid-19 crisis, will exacerbate existing healthcare inequalities in the city, and called on authorities to intervene on behalf of the hospital, an oasis black and brown south side, mainly in the medical desert.
“We’re saying the governor, as well as the mayor, will do what needs to be done to make sure this hospital stays open to serve the black community,” said Robert Jones, pastor of the nearby Mount Carmel Baptist Church. At the downtown exhibition earlier this week. “If this hospital closes, people will die.”
Located in neighboring Bronzville, once known as the city’s Black Metropolis, Mercy was founded in 1852, and is regarded as a safety net hospital, serving mostly blacks, the poor and the elderly. But Michigan-based Trinity, which operates about 100 healthcare centers nationwide, announced over the summer that it plans to close Mercy after plans to merge with other Southside hospitals earlier this year and could not find a buyer for 292. -Bed facility.
Mercy could only shut down in February if the closure is approved by the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board when it meets on Monday, December 15th.
Activists and South Side residents rallied ahead of next week’s future board meeting, holding daily demonstrations – including a vigil at Mercy and protests near City Hall downtown – to draw attention to health care inequalities, the shutdown will intensify and the Illinois governor , J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot take the step.
At a downtown rally on Monday afternoon, Shannon Bennett said leaders need to take the lead. “We’re calling you.”
Add to that the outrage is a shutdown schedule that will continue to plague the United States with coronaviruses.
“The timing is awful,” civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, who took part in the Save Mercy demonstration in early December, called the Guardian and told Gracian.
In a statement to the Chicago Sun-Times after the first day of Mercy Week, a spokesman for Lightfoot said the mayor acknowledged that “our hospitals play a vital role in our healthcare system,” and a spokesman for Pritzker said his office “Rethinking the decision to close Mercy Hospital.”
“The state is ready and willing to work with them to shut down and avoid.”
But activists and healthcare activists say more needs to be done, especially during the epidemic, which has disproportionately affected the black, poor and elderly Chicago people who serve Mercy.
“They are signing the death of the community if they close the hospital,” Dude Anudeep Dasaraju, a medical resident of the University of Illinois-Chicago working in Mercy’s emergency room, said in a demonstration outside the Thompson Center on Monday. Illinois State Government Offices.
Illinois State Representative Lamont Robinson, who is hospitalized in his district, said, “Leaders who will be able to persuade Trinity to keep Mercy open, or sell it to someone who will keep it open, need to step in now and it must be too late.” Lamont Robinson, whose district includes a hospital, wrote in the Sun-Times op-ed on Wednesday.
The governor’s office did not return a request for comment from the Guardian.
“The decision to shut down services at Mercy Hospital was not an easy one,” Trinity Health wrote in a statement. “We hope that city and state leaders will take the necessary bold steps to transform our care system to better meet the needs of patients on the South Side. We are committed to being a part of that transformation. ”
With the emergence of medical deserts in urban and rural areas, in both Chicago and nationwide, the proximity of Mercy Hospital is a major problem facing access to closed health care.
In Chicago alone, more than a dozen hospitals have closed in the last two decades. Four of those cities were predominantly black and brown on the south and west sides, according to ABC7 Chicago analysis this fall.
According to Margie Skps, executive director of the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group, the problem in Chicago is not necessarily the lack of hospitals in the city – it’s just that [doesn’t] Keep them in the right place.
“It’s always on the backs of black and brown communities that we shut down services,” Schapps said in a phone interview, “and it sends a real message about who cares.”
Dr. El, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago at the University of Chicago. Elizabeth Tung told the Guardian that in recent decades, the increasing privatization of health care, due to the decline of the Reagan-era social security net, has helped increase the trend of shutdowns across the country. .
Mercy is “one in a hundred, close, if not more, in the last decade or so across the country,” said Tung, who studies race and wealth inequalities in healthcare.
“That closure happens inconsistently in most needy communities,” Tang continued, adding that black communities have been hit particularly hard. “Financial incentives are misused.”
In addition to systemic problems with health financing, Scapps said poor planning by Illinois state leaders has led to the creation of a medical desert that could provide residents with not only poor access to critical services, but also hospitals without financial and employment opportunities. Area.
“What does he say to the community when the anchor organization closes?” Said Schapps.
If Mercy closes, Trinity says it plans to open an outpatient center in Bronzville, as well as Northwestern Medicine.
“It’s better than nothing,” Tung said. “But definitely it doesn’t take into account the vacuum [other needs] In the community. ”
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