The chair that Steward Health Care CEO Dr. Ralph de la Torre was supposed to occupy was empty. He was subpoenaed to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions for a hearing Thursday about how management decisions have impacted patient care at hospitals owned by the company.
The absence of de la Torre didn’t stop senators from offering withering criticism of the heart surgeon who created the country’s largest for-profit hospital operator and led it into a financial implosion and ultimately bankruptcy.
“He personally received hundreds of millions of dollars, some of which ruined the hospitals, shutout patients without care, workers being laid off. And some of that money he used to purchase this million dollar yacht,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, pointing to a picture of a large yacht.
De la Torre’s refusal to appear was not a surprise. His attorney sent a letter on September 4, objecting to the compelled testimony and saying that he was declining to comply. Who did show up were Steward nurses working in what they described as beleaguered and short-staffed hospitals.
Ellen MacInnis, a nurse at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton for 26 years, said one of the biggest impacts of Steward’s years-long financial decline and chronic understaffing has been the amount of time patients spend in emergency rooms, often “hours, sometimes a couple of days.”
MacInnis said the practice when newborn babies die is to place their remains in a bereavement box and take it to the morgue.
“Steward didn’t pay the vendor and there weren’t any bereavement boxes and nurses were forced to put baby’s remains in cardboard shipping boxes,” she said.
MacInnis later testified that nurses put their own funds together to buy bereavement boxes on Amazon. As a member of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, the union representing staff at Steward facilities, she also had insight into other facilities’ conditions, particularly the emergency rooms.
“One 81-year-old gentleman came in for chemotherapy for his pancreatic cancer, and by the time staff got to him, he was dead,” Macinnis said, citing an example from Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton.
She said there were 95 patients in Good Samaritan’s emergency department at the time and only 11 nurses. She said Steward’s recent closure of Carney Hospital in Dorchester, which saw more than 30,000 patients annually, will have significant impact.
“Boston EMS takes 6,000 patients a year to Carney Hospital. Where are they going to go? We don’t have the capacity in Boston for this,” she said.
Audra Sprague was among the almost 500 health care workers who lost their jobs last month after a federal judge overseeing Steward’s bankruptcy approved the company’s request to abruptly close Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer.
She described the process of setting up difficult intravenous lines for critically ill patients using an electric drill that goes through the bone into the marrow. The drill battery stopped working, and she said the vendor couldn’t provide a new one since they hadn’t been paid.
“We ended up getting this subpar ... it was like a Fisher-Price toy. It felt like it was less mechanical, like you had to hand pump it to get this big bore needle to go through bone into a patient. It was ... technically it worked, but it was ridiculously poor quality,” she said.
Spague said that long before Nashoba Valley’s closure, even beds weren’t being fixed. By the end, she said they were left with only 18 to 20 working beds out of the original 57. The aftermath of the closure, Sprague said, has been disastrous for the area, which has little public transit.
“Our transport times for ambulances have doubled or tripled. Our local EMS systems are in no way going to able to consistently meet these needs,” she said.
Sen. Ed Markey pledged to continue holding not only Steward Health Care accountable, but other private equity firms involved in its demise.
He noted a report his office released yesterday, detailing the impacts of Steward’s mismanagement.
“Death rates for certain conditions at Steward-owned hospitals went up as rates for those same conditions went down,” said Markey in a press conference on Thursday. He said the Senate will vote next week on whether to hold de la Torre in contempt for failing to appear.
“We know that Steward Health Care is not an exception. It is an example of how private equity and real estate investment trusts treat hospitals as their own personal piggy banks,” said Markey. “This is why we must create permanent reform that puts patients first at every level of health care.”
