About 50 patients affected by the planned closing of Grady Memorial Hospital’s outpatient dialysis clinic will receive three months of treatment at Fresenius at no cost to them.
The costs will be picked up by the Grady Memorial Hospital Corporation while other arrangements are worked out.
“During that time, GMHC will work with each patient to find a long-tern alternative plan for each patient,” Pamela S. Stephenson, chair of The Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority, which contracts with GMHC to run with hospital, said in a statement ... “GMHC has agreed to work with the authority to implement this plan and to provide timely reports on the progress of this plan.”
The statement seems to indicate that the authority will not do anything to stand in the way of the clinic’s closure, as some patients and advocates had hoped.
The outpatient clinic is expected to close at the end of business on Saturday. The clinic is outdated, and loses between $2 million and $4 million a year.
Before the meeting some authority members had questioned whether the outpatient clinic’s closing violated the contract between the authority and GMHC, which demands that Grady continues its mission to serve the poor.
“I’m in a much better place today than I was last week,” said authority member Thomas W. Dortch Jr. Dortch said his concern was to make sure that “nobody was just turned out into the streets.” Dortch said he wanted to see other counties chip in to help Grady financially because the safety-net hospitals provides care for people from over all the metro area and indeed, the state.
“These are very critical times for Grady,” he said.
Last week, a Fulton County judge lifted a temporary restraining order that cleared the way for Grady to close the clinic. Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville said patients and advocates had not presented enough evidence to prove that the patients needed the court’s intervention.
Grady had been criticized by patients advocates and community leaders for a controversial plan to pay the relocation costs for some patients to move to another state or back to their home country.
Maria Munoz, whose mother takes dialysis, said she was worried that her mother, an illegal immigrant, would have to move out of state for care. The three months care “is good news. We really didn’t have anywhere to go. Everything we have is pretty much here.”
Dr. Neil Shulman, a patient advocate, said he has called private clinics asking whether they would be willing to take some of the patients for long-term care. Several said they wanted to meet and discuss the possibility.
“Lives are literally at stake here,” said Shulman, a member Grady Advocates for Responsible Care. “This has to be monitored very closely with lots of checks and balances. I just think it’s easy for people to fall through the cracks because of the complexities of their problems and limited resources of the institution.”
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