A state board has approved plans by Northwestern Medicine to spend more than $100 million to expand care at its downtown hospital and open a suburban medical office building — despite concerns from labor leaders that minority workers and patients are being left out of the system’s efforts.
Northwestern plans to spend $77.6 million on a project that will include adding 24 intensive care unit beds and 25 medical and surgical beds to its flagship hospital in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, partly to relieve overcrowding in its emergency department.
A lack of beds throughout the hospital has caused backups in the ER that have led to more than 3,000 patients a year leaving without being seen, according to an application filed by Northwestern with the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board. Those backups have caused the hospital to go on bypass and ask ambulances to take new patients elsewhere.
Northwestern Memorial went on bypass more than any other Chicago-area hospital between 2017 and the first half of 2019, a Tribune investigation revealed last year. It was on bypass about 31% of the time during that period and has been investigated by the state for its use of the practice.
Northwestern also plans to spend $28.9 million to open a medical office building in west suburban Bloomingdale. The project, which would involve renovating an existing building, would consolidate three medical offices into “one modernized location” that will increase patients’ access to preventative services, the health system said in an application to the state.
The board voted Tuesday to approve the two projects over the concerns of SEIU Healthcare Illinois, a union representing about 1,200 workers at Northwestern Memorial, including housekeepers, certified nursing assistants and dietary workers.
The union wants Northwestern use its funds to treat more patients on Medicaid, a state and federally funded health insurance program for the poor and disabled. And it wants to see Northwestern build facilities to care for patients on the city’s West and South sides, rather than in affluent suburbs.
“While Northwestern hires a lot of service and maintenance workers who are Black and brown, they don’t seem particularly interested in providing health care to black and brown communities, where care is most needed,” Greg Kelley, president of SEIU Healthcare Illinois Indiana Missouri Kansas, said during a news conference earlier this month.
“We live in these areas, and nothing is in proximity to us,” said Kimberly Smith, a patient care technician at Northwestern who spoke at the board meeting Tuesday.
Union leaders also would like to see Northwestern pay its workers more. At some points during the last year, vacancies in housekeeping have been as high as 20% to 25% because of low pay, union leaders say. That, in turn, has led to a lack of enough clean beds for patients, which has been partly to blame for Northwestern’s ER backups, they allege..
In a statement Tuesday after the board approved its plans, Northwestern spokesman Christopher King said the hospital continues to “invest across the Chicagoland area to provide improved access to healthcare for all of the communities that we serve. This includes investments in our facilities, our clinical offerings, our community partnerships, and our people.”
The leaders of Erie Family Health Centers and Near North Health Service Corp., which serve many low-income patients, told the state board they work with Northwestern to care for many poor patients.
“Northwestern reaches our patients regardless of their insurance coverage or ability to pay,” said Dr. Lee Francis, president and CEO of Erie. “Their expansions do directly benefit our patients.”
As part of the plans for its Gold Coast hospital, Northwestern intends to construct a three-story building connecting the Feinberg Pavillion to the Galter Pavillion, on the 10th, 11th and 12th floors.
The connector will help staff safely transport “critically deteriorating” patients because they won’t need to take as many elevator trips, and it will help staff move supplies, medications, equipment and food between the two buildings more efficiently, Northwestern said in its application.
The Chicago project is expected to be completed by December 2022, and the Bloomingdale office is expected to be done by June 2022.
In recent years, a number of city-based hospital systems have expanded their reach into the suburbs, in hopes of attracting more patients and caring for patients closer to where they live, as they compete with other systems.
