PeaceHealth is based in Vancouver and operates PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center. It is Clark County’s largest employer, with over 4,200 full-time and part-time employees.
Eugene, Ore. — Hospitalists treating patients at Sacred Heart Medical centers in Springfield and Eugene will not be outsourced to a third-party company, PeaceHealth officials said.
Instead, the 27 hospitalists — doctors who care for patients around the clock — will remain PeaceHealth employees and now report to the newly created department of hospital medicine at Sacred Heart Medical Center, said Rand O’Leary, Sacred Heart’s chief administrative officer.
The decision ends months of uncertainty for the hospitalists. PeaceHealth had been looking into having Sound Physicians, a hospitalist business based in Tacoma, manage them.
But “ultimately, it was not the best option for us,” O’Leary said.
“We are thrilled that we are not being outsourced,” said David Schwartz, a Sacred Heart hospitalist and spokesman for the Pacific Northwest Hospital Medicine Association. Formed in October, it is the first hospitalists union in the United States.
Still to be addressed is a severe shortage of hospitalists at Sacred Heart, hospitalists said.
There are the equivalent of 25 full-time hospitalists at Sacred Heart; that will drop to 22.45 in May, the hospitalists said. Last summer, there were the equivalent of 37 full-time hospitalists.
PeaceHealth has brought in temporary doctors, called locums, but that has only added about seven full-time physicians, the hospitalists said.
“We are still concerned,” Schwartz said Thursday. “There are more locums coming aboard in April, but the hospital is still at capacity.”
He added that the administration has been “very cooperative about communicating in real time about our census, pending admissions, pending discharges, and going on divert (diverting patients to other hospitals) if we are past safe capacity.”
O’Leary said Sacred Heart is trying to hire more hospitalists “as soon as possible,” while acknowledging the challenging environment nationally for recruiting physicians.
He did not provide any figures of how many hospitalists Sacred Heart hopes to add and in what time frame.
In a message to the hospitalists this month, O’Leary said, “all current employment terms and conditions of the hospitalists remain the same.”
He did not respond directly to questions about whether those employment terms and conditions might change in the future, or might be different for new hires. “Sacred Heart Medical Center is in the process of bargaining on an initial contract with the union representing the hospitalists,” he said. “That’s a process we conduct only at the bargaining table.”
O’Leary also has told hospitalists that under the new structure, they will report to him and the Sacred Heart Medical Center executive team, rather than to PeaceHealth Medical Group.
