With a growing threat looming from the global coronavirus pandemic, another Kansas small-town hospital has shut down.

“Now’s not the time for anyone to be losing a hospital,” said Wellington City Manager Shane Shields.

Sumner Community Hospital abruptly closed Thursday night after years of financial difficulties, which Shields said were at least partially fueled by the state government’s indecision on expanding Medicaid in Kansas.

It’s the sixth rural hospital to close in Kansas in the past 10 years, records show.

On Friday, a trickle of patients who hadn’t gotten word of the closure were greeted by a sign on the door reading “SUMNER COMMUNITY HOSPITAL and the EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT are CLOSED.”

The sign advised patients to call 911 if in need of immediate medical assistance and listed another phone number where they could leave a message to retrieve their medical records.

The main entrance into the hospital was blocked off with a blue plastic tarp shielding the corridor from public view. A woman controlling access said there was no one on the property who could answer any questions about the closure.

When asked who was in charge Friday, she responded, “please leave.”

Missed appointments

The closure came as a surprise to Olive Hale, who showed up for a Friday morning appointment with her pulmonary and sleep physician.

“They called me Wednesday and said ‘Don’t forget about your appointment at 11,” she said.

After seeing the closure sign on the door, Hale stopped a woman in hospital scrubs in the parking lot to see if she could get answers. Hale said the woman told her she was a nurse who had just been called in to help out in the pharmacy, which was closed along with the rest of the hospital and the adjacent doctors’ offices and therapy center.

Hale said she planned go home and call her doctor’s Wichita office and reschedule an appointment there. “It’s nothing life-threatening or anything, so . . .”

She said the hospital closure will be “a pretty big deal” for Wellington, 35 miles south of Wichita.

“There are a lot of elderly people down here in Sumner County who rely on this hospital,” she said.

Arlo Helm, 92, was scheduled for a physical therapy appointment Friday.

“I’ve had problems with stumbling around,” he said. “I slipped last night at the house.”

Just before he left home for his Friday appointment, he got a phone call telling him not to come in.

“They said ‘We’re sorry, we don’t have any more therapy because they closed the hospital,’” Helm said.

He said he doesn’t plan to seek care anywhere else.

Cormac Johnston, a former Wichita attorney, said he moved to Wellington about five years ago and has been treated at the hospital ever since.

In 2017, he had back, neck and hernia surgeries in Wichita and has gotten his follow-up care — including CT and MRI scans and shots for nerve pain — at Sumner Community Hospital ever since.

“They have stabilized my back so I didn’t have to go back for more surgery,” he said. “It helped me enormously.”

The hospital was also part of his spiritual life. He was an every-week participant in the Saturday morning Bible study class led by local physician Larry Anderson.

“I just live a couple of blocks from the hospital and it was very convenient,” he said.

He said he doesn’t have a driver’s license and it’s hard to find a ride into Wichita. “Most people with a car work outside Wellington,” he said. “It’s going to be a big problem.”

Uber and Lyft don’t come to Wellington because it’s too far for the drivers, who only get paid one-way, he said. And a local bus company charges $60 for the round trip into the city.

Financial woes

Shields said Wellington has had a hospital going back at least to the 1950s. At one point, it had two hospitals that merged into a single campus in 1994, he said.

The city owns the hospital building and some of the furnishings and equipment. Until 2018, it was run by a community board appointed by the City Council.

But the facility was constantly struggling financially. In an effort to save the hospital, the city worked out a lease agreement in late 2018 for the hospital to be taken over by Rural Hospital Group, a Kansas City management and consulting firm, Shields said.

The plan was that RHG would run the existing hospital, with partial funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, while seeking a larger USDA grant to replace it with a smaller and more efficient facility.

Shield said the city was informed Wednesday that the hospital would close within days, but left it to RHG to make any official announcements because “it was their business decision” to shut it down.

On Friday, the phone at RHG’s headquarters went unanswered.

The most immediate impact on Wellington will fall on the city’s emergency medical services, Shields said.

City ambulances have routinely taken trauma victims into Wichita. But now, they’ll have to transport all patients who need emergency room care into the city, he said.

The closest options for residents requiring non-emergency hospital care will now be Winfield, 24 miles away; and Derby, 26 miles. The only other hospital in Sumner County is in Caldwell, near the Oklahoma border 28 miles southwest of Wellington.

Medicaid a factor

Shields said the state government’s years of indecision over expanding the KanCare Medicaid program to cover more poor and uninsured Kansans played a role in the loss of the hospital.

While he couldn’t speak to RHG’s business, he said expanded Medicaid might have made a difference when the hospital was still under public control.

He said he couldn’t say for sure that the extra revenue from expanded Medicaid would have saved the hospital, but “it certainly would have improved the chances.”

The state Legislature has grappled with expansion of Medicaid since it was first offered by the federal government in 2013, to fill a gap in the Affordable Care Act created when the Supreme Court upheld most of the national health program, but left the decision on expanding Medicaid to the states.

In 2017, legislators passed a bill to accept the expansion, which would be 90 percent paid by the federal government. But that was vetoed by then-Gov. Sam Brownback.

The Kansas House of Representatives has since approved another bill to accept the expansion, but it’s stalled in the Senate.

Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, has vowed to block the bill from coming to a vote until the House reverses itself and passes a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn a state Supreme Court decision limiting the Legislature’s authority to regulate abortion.

Sumner Community Hospital joins a list of five other Kansas rural hospitals that have closed since 2010.

The others include: Central Kansas Medical Center of Great Bend, Horton Community Hospital, Mercy Hospital of Fort Scott, Mercy Hospital of Independence and Oswego Community Hospital, according to a list compiled last year by Becker’s Hospital CFO Report.

Approximately 75 jobs were lost in the Wellington hospital’s closure, Shields said. The hospital was one of the city’s top 10 employers, he said.

Steve Champagne, a nurse anesthetist at the hospital, left Friday with a box containing his personal belongings from his desk.

“I’ve been out on sick leave,” he said. “I just came back to get my stuff.”

He said the hospital closure is sad for the community.

But he thinks he’ll be all right because he’s in a high-demand field.

“I’ve reached out to a couple of people in Wichita,” he said. “I’ll land on my feet.”