By ANDY GARDNER

MASSENA -- Massena Memorial Hospital finished March with a loss from operations of more than $100,000.

The statistical and financial summary made public at Monday’s MMH Board of Managers meeting shows $108,866 loss from operations for the month. They had budgeted to come out ahead $101,189.

Officials from the hospital said the bulk of that loss was because of $105,000 in “one-time expenses.”

CEO Robert Wolleben said they made two large payments last month. One was a retroactive payment because of a contract obligation with New York State Nurses Association, the union representing their nursing staff. They also paid a $65,000 physician recruitment fee.

CFO Pat Facteau said they are paying for locum physicians to staff the hospital while they work towards running their own hospitalist program. Locum means the doctors travel and come in on an as-needed basis. Hospitalists treat only patients who are hospitalized.

“Some may become permanent, that will help reduce the cost of the hospitalist program,” Facteau said.

Wolleben said they also are looking at using physician assistants to treat patients during quieter hours.

“What we’re working on is working towards maybe toward the PA be the only person at night when things are quieter, a little more reasonable. We’re still working on that with Department of Internal Medicine,” he told the board. “We are working very hard looking for permanent people to fill our spots.”

During Facteau’s report, he tried to draw attention to several areas of the hospital he says had increased volume for the month, despite the monetary loss.

“The first quarter we’re up 20 percent in regards to admissions,” he told the board. “Louisville [Health Center’] is up 24 percent, surgical’s up 18 percent … newborns are up 39 percent.

This is the first time MMH has lost money over the course of a month in close to two years. They had been bleeding cash, sometimes posting monthly losses sometimes as high as $400,000, but were breaking even with government aid money.

For over a year now, MMH has been going through the process of becoming a privatized non-profit entity with the aim of affiliating with a larger health system. Officials have said that could fix their financial problems and possibly enable them to offer more services. MMH will need to privatize and affiliate in order to keep receiving aid from the state, Wolleben has said in the past.