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Northern Light Health to close Waterville hospital
Photo / Courtesy Northern Light Health
Northern Light Inland Hospital and its associated services and clinics in Waterville will stop clinical services on May 27.
Northern Light Health said Thursday it would close Northern Light Inland Hospital and its associated services and clinics in Waterville, citing operating losses of $1 million to $1.5 million per month, unsustainably low reimbursement rates and a tight labor market.
The decision to close was made on Wednesday after lengthy consideration of other alternatives, said Marie Vienneau, Northern Light Health’s senior vice president and regional president.
“While many of the challenges facing Inland are similar to those at hospitals throughout Maine and the rest of the country, solutions working well in other facilities and the communities we serve have not proven successful in Waterville,” said Tim Dentry, Northern Light Health’s president and CEO.
Most of the staff of 300-plus employees will be redeployed to other Northern Light hospitals and sites.
Decade-long problem
The Waterville service area has a specific combination of needs and resources that make the challenges insurmountable, Northern Light said. That includes Inland being near other facilities that offer similar levels and types of care, the service area not having the patient volume or payer mix necessary to sustain all of the facilities and increasing competition for a limited number of qualified employees.
The facility has experienced sustained financial hardship for a decade, and it is not feasible to replace or maintain the aging facility or equipment necessary to continue to provide the standard of care our patients need and deserve.
Clinical services are planned to continue though May 27. Vienneau said Northern Light would help patients transition to other care.
The city of Waterville and surrounding communities have a number of health care options, she noted.
The closure will allow Northern Light Health to direct Inland’s resources to its other locations, she added.
“It became apparent that near-term strategies would not bring us back to positive or even near-positive operating margins,” Vienneau said.
The industry’s tight labor market contributed to the closure.
“It’s extremely difficult,” she said, particularly for rural Maine, which is Northern Light’s focus area.
“Reimbursement has not kept up with inflation and we don’t have enough human resources to go around in almost every category, so it’s difficult to maintain high-quality services when you don’t have the amount of staff, providers and other caregivers to provide the care,” she said.
She added, “There are no easy answers to how to fix that problem."
Other options
Inland and its associated clinics have about 13% of the Waterville market share. Waterville and the surrounding communities are within close proximity to a number of health care options.
“Every community is different, with different needs and varying resources available to them,” said Dentry. “For Northern Light Inland Hospital, the number of service providers in the Waterville service area outweigh the operation’s critical resources available and patient volumes are not adequate to balance the costs of maintaining operations.”
This decision does not affect Northern Light Continuing Care, Lakewood, also located in Waterville.
There are no plans to close any other Northern Light hospital.
Northern Light has been in discussions with other area hospitals about assuming patients, Vienneau said.
On March 1, Inland closed its women’s health obstetrics and gynecology services and formed successful clinical relationships with MaineGeneral to transfer care, she said. With the full closure, Inland will continue to work with MaineGeneral and other Northern Light facilities to transition care.
Staff transitions
The transition of staff to other Northern Light facilities could improve fragile staffing challenges there, she added.
Inland has 309 full-time employees.
“We have our talent team on the ground working with employees to transition them,” she said.
It’s thought that Northern Light has jobs for all of them, she said.
The closure is expected to help stem steepening financial losses across the system.
“It will not resolve everything,” she said. “But this is one of those difficult decisions that had to be made in order to sustain health care in the every rural areas of Maine where we provide care.”
She continued, “This closure is a piece of the puzzle toward getting toward financial stability. Inland has been a challenged hospital for the better part of the last decade, so even though it was very difficult decision, it was something we felt we needed to do.”
There are a number of regulatory requirements to closing a health care facility, so it will take several months to wind down operations, the system said.
It is anticipated the facilities will formally close operations June 11.
Northern Light Health plans to maintain the facility and grounds while stewarding the sale of the property.
“We’d like to see another type provider occupy this building in the future,” said Vienneau. “We intend to have community conversations about what that type of provider might be. But we don’t have a timeline for putting it up for sale. We want to have those conversations and have conversation with potential providers before doing that. That will happen in the near-future.”
Northern Light Inland Hospital is a 48-bed community hospital with primary and specialty care physician offices in Waterville, Oakland, Unity and Madison, as well as a continuing care facility on the Waterville campus.
Steepening losses
Northern Light Health, Maine’s second-largest health care system, is trying to reverse a trend of steepening financial losses across the system.
Operational losses have averaged over $100 million per year over the last three years and Northern Light Health has debt of $620 million.
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