Authority to run PG hospital

ANNAPOLIS (AP) — The troubled Prince George’s Hospital Center will be taken over by a county-state authority that will seek to sell it to a private company.

The 268-bed hospital and three related facilities are currently owned by Prince George’s County and operated by a nonprofit company. An agreement announced yesterday calls for the hospital to be sold outright after years of floating near insolvency.

The hospital has come close to closing several times in recent years because many of its patients are too poor to pay. The center treats about 180,000 patients a year.

The agreement calls for an authority to be set up to sell the hospital. The plan must be approved by the legislature but has the backing of state lawmakers from Prince George’s and county officials.

Lawmakers set aside $50 million last fall to save the hospital, and the deal announced yesterday calls for that money to be used until the hospital is sold.

Gov. Martin O’Malley, who announced the agreement in a State House ceremony flanked by county officials, called the Prince George’s Hospital Authority a “long-term solution” to stop a series of public subsidies keeping hospital doors open.

Mr. O’Malley, a Democrat, called current management of the hospital, Maryland’s second-busiest trauma center, “just kind of taping it together, one year to the next.”

If the plan passes, the authority will consist of seven persons charged with finding a buyer for the hospital within a year. A takeover plan would be due in January for final state approval, after which time the land and the hospital facilities would be sold.

“We were committed to making sure this hospital stayed open,” said Prince George’s County Executive Jack B. Johnson, a Democrat who said government agencies have spent $70 million in the past five years trying to keep the hospital afloat.

Some hospital employees attended the announcement to cheer the news. They were especially happy to hear that the authority will be instructed to find a buyer willing to work on recruiting good doctors and nurses.

“It’s hard to attract doctors and nurses to a hospital we don’t know if has a future,” said Linda Bock, a registered nurse at the Senior Health Center in Brentwood.

Miss Bock’s sister, registered nurse Rita Jensen, said that uncertainty at the hospital has soured employee morale as well as patient care and that equipment across the system was out of date because hospital managers weren’t sure whether the hospital would close.

“It’s like, why fix up your house if you’re going to move?” said Miss Jensen, a hospital nurse who has interviewed for other nursing jobs as far away as Hawaii.

The proposed authority will head to lawmakers in the form of amendments to an existing bill about the hospital. Supporters from Prince George’s County said they anticipated that the bill would be an easy sell, even in a cooling economy that gives lawmakers fewer dollars to spend.

“We have an obligation to provide health care for citizens,” said Sen. C. Anthony Muse, Prince George’s Democrat. “It will at least move away from being a state-supported hospital.”

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