Good Samaritan Hospital employees are being offered jobs at other Premier Health facilities as the health system winds down operations over the next month, ending an 90 year run as a fixture of northwest Dayton.
Premier Health, which operates the hospital, publicly announced last week that the final closing time and date will be 12:01 a.m. July 23.
Major services have already started to close or will be transferred out soon. The maternity unit closed in April and the emergency department will close noon July 19, not at 11:59 p.m. July 19 as was originally announced.
About 1,600 people were working at the hospital main campus when the closure was announced in January.
“We anticipate that we will offer a position elsewhere within Premier Health to every employee at Good Samaritan Hospital’s Philadelphia Drive campus who expressed an interest in remaining employed with us, consistent with our previously stated goal,” Premier Health said in a statement Monday.
The Dayton-based health system had previously said it would close Good Samaritan no later than Aug. 29 but at the time hadn’t shared a specific date.
MORE: Good Sam emergency department closing date set
Some of the next steps will include transferring orthopedics, cardiac care and other services to other sites, provider and staff orientations, transferring of equipment and supplies and preparations for changes in signage.
All satellite locations with the Good Samaritan moniker will be renamed to reflect Miami Valley Hospital, which is the licensed hospital they will be operating under starting July 23.
The hospital campus at 2222 Philadelphia Drive will be torn down sometime after the closure. The parking garage will remain.
Five Rivers Health Centers, which is a separate nonprofit headquartered at the Good Samaritan campus, will continue to operate as a community health center after the hospital closes.
Premier plans to give $10 million toward redeveloping the site. CityWide Development, a private economic development corporation, and Planning NEXT, the same firm contracted on the fairgrounds project, are working on an outline of how the site could be redeveloped.
RELATED: Five Rivers Health Center on Good Sam campus says it’s here to stay
The health system said it anticipates that it will finalize recommendations for the site to present to the Phoenix board by the end of 2018.
Prior to that, there will be another public input session in late August. Then an open house to show initial concepts for how the property might be redeveloped is currently slated for October.
Meanwhile, there's a pending federal civil rights complaint that a group of clergy filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service about the hospital closure. The complaint says the closure is a civil rights violation of black residents now served by the hospital and also will harm women through the loss of maternal health care in an area with high rates of infant mortality.
Good Samaritan is now the closest hospital for 38,600 people — 75 percent of them black, according to a study of travel times by the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University.
Ellis Jacobs, an attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, which is representing the clergy in the lawsuit, said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is assigning an investigator to look into the complaint. The first step was the Office of Civil Rights determining it had authority to investigate the complaint.
RELATED: ‘Bad news’ for the city: 7 reactions to Good Samaritan Hospital’s closure
Premier leaders have said the closure was a difficult but necessary decision, responding to the changing health care system. There are too many empty beds at Premier’s two hospitals in the city of Dayton, Good Samaritan and Miami Valley, and there would be costly repairs to keep the aging facility up to code, hospital officials said.
Premier has also previously said that patients and employees from the neighborhoods around Good Samaritan area are already coming to its other hospital in the city, Miami Valley Hospital, which shows there will still be access to hospital jobs and services.
THE STORY SO FAR
PREVIOUSLY: Premier announced in January that it would close Good Samaritan Hospital sometime this year, later saying it would be sometime before Aug. 29.
WHAT'S NEW: The closing date for Good Samaritan Hospital has been set for July 23.
WHAT'S NEXT: The hospital campus eventually will be torn down. Premier said it anticipates presenting recommendations for the site to the Phoenix board by the end of this year.
About the Author