By ANDY GARDNER

MASSENA -- Massena Memorial Hospital employees turned out in force, about 50 strong, at Wednesday night’s Town Council meeting and told their elected officials that that senior management is not telling them anything about the ongoing look into privatization.

They also complained that their ideas for cost-cutting measures continue to fall on deaf ears.

“To this day we’ve heard zero, nothing from them at all,” CSEA representative Wayne Lincoln said. “Nothing gets mentioned at [an MMH] board meeting, unless it’s in executive session.”

But, MMH Public Relations Director Tina Corcoran told NorthCountryNow.com today the opposite is true.

“There were updates given,” she said, citing a discussion at Monday’s Board of Managers meeting in regard to hiring FreedMaxick. She also pointed to a Tuesday meeting of department heads where MMH CEO Charles Fahd shared information that the leaders were to pass along to employees.

“We do continue with communication flowing,” Corcoran said.

She noted that Lincoln was present at Monday night’s Board of Managers meeting but declined to speak during a period reserved for questions and comments from the public and press. Corcoran urged hospital employees and union representatives to attend Board of Managers meetings and speak up.

The hospital is looking at going from a municipal entity to a private non-profit. MMH recently hired Hancock Estabrook, a legal firm, to study the legal side of the transition and FreedMaxick Healthcare to look into the financial end. Both studies are ongoing.

The studies come on the heels of growing losses and dwindling insurance reimbursements. At Monday night’s Board of Managers meeting, the hospital reported a $1,923,772 net loss year-to-date.

Town Supervisor Joseph Gray said he has had meetings with senior hospital leaders, including Board of Managers President Andrew Spanburgh and CEO Charles Fahd. He said they told him the studies are examining three scenarios: stay as they are, become a private non-profit, or become a public benefit corporation.

Lincoln said employees have suggested numerous measures to save money, including switching health insurance, but management isn’t listening to them. Other suggestions have included getting the emergency room designated as a level four trauma center, which only requires software upgrades, he said. The trauma designation would allow the hospital to bill at higher rates for serious emergency cases that qualify as level four traumas.

The hospital is undertaking the upgraded trauma designation. The Board of Managers voted Monday night to purchase the software, which Corcoran said will take six months to fully implement.

“That is something we are pursuing,” she said.

Lincoln painted a bleak picture of the inner workings at the hospital. He said employees are jumping ship because of the uncertain future and doctors are losing faith in the institution.

“We’ve got good people bailing. Three key, hard-to-replace people are bailing … They lost their most productive [physician’s assistant],” he told the board, adding that the P.A., who he did not identify, had 1,000 patients. “The doctors are now boycotting the hospital. As of January 1, they are not admitting to Massena Memorial Hospital, they’re sending them elsewhere.”

In response to this, the Board of Managers is pursuing a hospitalist program, where patients who don’t have a regular doctor can be examined by a hospitalist physician and admitted.

“It’s an important step, a big step, an expensive step,” Fahd said Monday night, adding that it would parallel the cost of having an around-the-clock ER physician.

“Not all the info is in yet,” Fahd said.

“The doctors have wanted hospitalists for years – every other hospital in the North Country’s got them,” Lincoln said Wednesday.

In addition, Corcoran said the hospital recently hired several new physician’s assistants and nurse practitioners. She added that two physician’s assistants will be ready to resume regular work in the VA clinic, which has not been operating at full capacity for some time. They were waiting on a green light from the VA headquarters in Syracuse, which they received Tuesday.

The board said their meetings with MMH management give them an entirely different picture of how information is flowing.

“The one thing that hits me the most is they have monthly meetings between labor and management and [management is telling us] … they’re not hearing some of this stuff,” Gray said.

Jason Garcia, a hospital employee, urged hospital leadership to attend Gray’s committee meetings designed to facilitate communication between hospital leaders, laypeople, and the town.

“Not to my knowledge has Jason ever said anything to Mr. Fahd,” Corcoran said.

She said Spanburgh has advised the board that they are not required to participate in Gray’s committee because it is outside the scope of their normal duties.

“I think the most important thing is … the lines of communication must be open,” Councilman Albert Nicola said.

Councilman John Macaulay suggested the local CSEA chapter conduct its own financial study to see if their ideas to save money will actually be effective in the long run.

“I would think the big CSEA would help you,” he said.

Whatever road MMH decides to take after completing their studies, the Town Council makes the final decision.

“The final decision will be made in this room,” Gray said. “They can’t go off on their own and go to the Department of Health without the Town Council’s okay.”

One option would be a permissive referendum, which, if the town board signed off, would require 10 percent of the voters from the most recent gubernatorial election to sign a petition asking for a vote.

Gray said the ballot would not simply read “Keep the hospital a town entity or go private.”

“It would say something like ‘If we don’t privatize, this is what it’s going to cost you a year based on last year’s loss’,” he said, adding that currently it would raise town taxes somewhere between $250 and $270 per year on a home assessed at $70,000. “I’m against any referendum that doesn’t include figures like that. People need to know.”

No matter what happens, the state Department of Health could still come in and shut the hospital down. Currently, they are cleaning up hospitals in Brooklyn where, Gray said, in one extreme instance there is a facility with about three dozen beds and 1,400 employees.

“When they’re done with Brooklyn, they’re coming to the North Country,” Gray said, who has recently met with DOH Commissioner Nirav Shah. “They simply feel there are too many facilities for the population we have and they want something done about that.”

“If they want to shut down hospitals in the North Country, it’s going to be hard to stop it. They have a lot of power,” Councilman Charles Raiti said.