By Tom Kisken

tkisken@ VenturaCountyStar.com

Simi Valley Hospital officials delivered termination notices this week to 26 employees as part of plans to eliminate programs for outpatient therapy, workplace injuries and long-term care involving life support, officials said Tuesday.

Half of the employees are being offered different jobs in the hospital. The other 13 will lose their jobs in 60 to 120 days but could be offered work by other hospitals operated by Simi hospital's parent company, Adventist Health.

"We worry about our employees, but sometimes for the good of the whole, you have to do what you have to do," said Darwin Remboldt, the hospital's president and CEO. "We feel badly about that."

As it prepares to open a $75 million patient care tower that awaits final state approval, the hospital will eliminate its 16-bed subacute care program for seniors and other patients who need constant, long-term care. Many of them are on life support systems and are unlikely to recover, though others eventually return home.

No other facility in Simi Valley is licensed to deliver the care the patients need so they'll likely be transferred to facilities in the San Fernando Valley and west Ventura County, said Lori Sharma, director of operations for the Simi Valley Care

Center skilled nursing home. They'll get good care, but they'll be farther away.

"It will impact any of those residents where Simi Valley is their home and their families live there," she said. "The residents will be schlepped to facilities outside of their community."

But many of the patients already come from outside of Ventura County, said Remboldt. The program is losing money, and proposed cuts in the Medi-Cal insurance program would make the care "unsustainable," he said.

"We can't be supporting Kern County," he said. "We don't have the money to do that."

Also being eliminated is an outpatient program called The WorkPlace where businesses send employees who have work-related injuries or need drug screenings. And outpatient speech, physical and other therapy — in a program called Back To Work — will end.

All the programs struggle to get enough patients and placed a growing financial drain on an already struggling hospital that lost money last year, Remboldt said. It's redundant for the hospital to offer physical therapy programs when some 20 local businesses offer similar care, he said.

"It's just not a core business," Remboldt said of the targeted programs, emphasizing the hospital plans to improve its more traditional services, ranging from the emergency room to cardiology. "We need to focus on what we as an acute-care service can do and what we do well. We need to focus on what only we do."

The new patient care tower includes an intensive care program for newborns and expanded maternity and other programs.

The subacute program will close in about 120 days, and the two outpatient programs will end in 60 days.

Employees said Tuesday they couldn't talk about cuts and referred media questions to hospital spokesman Jeremy Brewer.

Termination notices went to physical and occupational therapists, admitting clerks, nurses and nursing assistants among others, Brewer said.

Most of the 13 employees who aren't being offered jobs at the hospital are certified nursing assistants who worked in the subacute care program, Remboldt said.

Some doctors worry about what is being lost. Dr. Jieshi Yan, a Simi Valley kidney disease specialist, noted some patients who need help breathing and end up in subacute care improve enough to go home.

He described the targeted programs as bridges that patients use to get better.

"If we take away this bridge, we basically throw the patient back into an environment where we're not even sure they will be safe," he said.

Others cite the assertion of hospital officials that the services being eliminated will help improve other care.

As there are alternatives to the services being cut, "it could be a good thing," said Dan Paranick, assistant city manager of Simi Valley.