This isn't
"Saving Hospitals"
It's killing them.
Prime Healthcare, the frequently sued, for-profit owner of three hospitals in the greater Philadelphia area, is planning to sell all three – Suburban Community Hospital in Norristown, Lower Bucks Hospital in Bristol, and Roxborough Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia. The Request For Proposal (RFP) includes the suggestion that the facilities, post-sale, could be converted from critical-care hospitals to behavioral health facilities.
Suburban General Hospital opened in 1944. Lower Bucks Hospital opened 10 years later in 1954.
Prime Healthcare purchased Lower Bucks Hospital in 2012, and Suburban General Hospital in 2016. Within 8 years of owning these long-standing hospitals, so vital to their communities, Prime has leached so much money and services from them that they’re now imperiled and up for sale.
Prime Healthcare, a California-based corporate umbrella for dozens of U.S. hospitals, is an out-of-state actor clearly unconcerned with the health and well-being of the people of Pennsylvania or with the nurses who provide their patient communities with care.
What Will Happen If East Norriton and Lower Bucks Lose Their Critical Care Hospitals
If Prime’s hospitals are sold and converted to behavioral health facilities, the effect on their patient communities will be dramatic and devastating. Ambulance response times will increase, patients will be transported farther and farther away for emergency services, nurses and healthcare professionals will lose their jobs, and the basic medical services provided at these institutions –
the services Pennsylvania families have relied on for decades – will cease.
Make No Mistake, Prime Needs To Go
We can't let Prime ditch & run.
We cannot allow Prime to abandon their patient communities in the same way Prospect Medical did when they abruptly closed Delaware County Memorial Hospital in 2022.
We must make them leave responsibly.
Suburban Community and Lower Bucks Hospitals need to remain open and fully functional critical care facilities. The East Norriton and Lower Bucks communities need and deserve ready access to critical care, just as they have had for the last 70 to 80 years.
The real fight is now revealed:
The nurses at Suburban Community Hospital in East Norriton and Lower Bucks Hospital in Bristol have been in contentious contract bargaining with Prime for months with no indication at any point from management of their hospitals’ impending sale. The real fight, it is now clear, centers on the very existence of their hospitals.