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The four-bed pediatric intensive care unit at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center will close in the first week of November, the hospital announced today.
“This decision comes after persistent challenges over the past several years including an ongoing low patient census,” it said in a statement.
St. Vincent Medical Center is a large hospital in Washington County just west of Portland. In 2024, the statement said, its four-bed PICU unit was empty for 155 days, and on days when the unit was not empty, it typically had one patient.
A spokesperson said the unit treated 122 patients in 2024, and their average length of stay was 31 hours.
Other health care systems in Portland provide pediatric intensive care unit services on a much larger scale, the hospital’s statement added, noting that leaders at Oregon Health & Science University and Legacy Health have in the past “expressed their readiness” to support pediatric intensive care needs in the community.
The St. Vincent PICU opened in 2013, when the hospital thought that demography and area growth might drive demand for its services, said hospital chief executive Dr. Ray Moreno in an interview with WW.
“And despite having a very busy emergency department and neonatal intensive care unit and an outpatient practice and an inpatient ward, fortunately for the community, there isn’t as much of a need for pediatric critical care” he says. “And we live in a community that has two excellent broad-scoped children’s hospitals who provide this critical care at a much larger scale.”
He added that, in assessing the ongoing need for the unit, “You say, ‘Are we the right person to be providing this service at this time? Or are there others in the community who can do this with more scale and more expertise?’ And that’s where we landed. It’s hard. These are our people and our colleagues, and this is a really hard day.”
The hospital says the unit’s team is composed of 20 registered nurses and three private-practice MDs, and its statement thanked the PICU team for years of service.
“Our hope is that our employed caregivers accept other positions within the organization,” the hospital said, noting that Providence will be working with the Oregon Nurses Association on the matter.
But the ONA was highly critical, calling the decision “abhorrent.” In a statement, the union said 20 of the nurses it represents will lose their jobs—a characterization a Providence spokesperson disputes.
The union also cast doubt on the hospital’s claim that the unit was unneeded.
“We’ve always been busy during respiratory virus season since Providence patients from across Oregon were moved to our PICU,” said Erin Piltz, a nurse at Providence St. Vincent, according to the union’s news release. “We have also advocated for years to be cross-trained so that we can serve more than just pediatric patients and have repeatedly been told there’s no budget.”
Providence Health & Services, a major health system in Oregon, has lately reported severe budget strain. It has announced layoffs in the state in recent months, and has said that in October it would close its inpatient obstetric and newborn care services at its hospital in Seaside. It said the maternity unit had seen diminished use.
