CHESTER, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — The emergency rooms of Crozer-Chester Medical Center and Taylor Hospital are set to shut down Friday. The hospitals stopped accepting ambulances earlier this week, but they have been accepting some walk-in patients.
Chester residents are scared they won’t have readily available access to emergency and trauma response services once the hospitals shut down for good next week.
A panel of eight representatives from various organizations, including the Delaware County Department of Health, tried to reassure dozens of residents at a community meeting at Chester City Hall Thursday night. They answered questions and shared information on resources for issues like maternal care, mental health crises, addiction recovery, and health care for workers losing their jobs.
But perhaps the biggest issue still unaddressed for neighbors like Zulene Mayfield is not having a hospital nearby for emergencies.
“This upsets me because I did come looking for some real, tangible information. Not no leaflets, not no ‘sign up for this’ and ‘sign up for that.’ All of those things are great if we were not in a critical state. And that’s where we are,” she said.
Fellow resident Lisha Long’s anger is mostly directed at Prospect Medical Holdings, the parent company that is shuttering the hospitals due to bankruptcy.
“This was just a company that came in and dismantled our health system and got away with it,” she said.
After the closures, the nearest hospital will be about half an hour away.
“It’s like putting a Band-Aid on it to fix it,” Long added. “We need a hospital and we need it now.”
Chester Health Commissioner Dr. Kristin Motley said the city is especially in need of quality health care because of preventable health disparities.
“Pediatric asthma, the infant mortality rate, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, driven largely by the environment. We had a hospital that could help mitigate that, and now that’s not there. And so people are literally going to die,” she said.
“It is important that we have discussions like today to plug some of the gaps, but it’s not going to resolve the main issue of health care in Chester.”
Taylor Hospital is set to close on April 28, and Crozer-Chester Medical Center will follow on May 2. After the closures, Riddle in Media and Mercy Fitzgerald in Lansdowne will be the only hospitals remaining in Delaware County.
Mayfield said this issue is a matter of life and death.
“It’s very scary because for other people, it will be statistics. But for us, it’s gonna be family members, people we love. It could be our children, our grandmothers, our parents. It could be me,” she said.