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Vibra Specialty Hospital of Portland will close, its CEO said Monday, leaving Oregon without a long-term acute care hospital and 310 workers soon without a job.
The 73-bed East Portland hospital specializes in treating patients going through an extended period of recovery, often after they have been stabilized and discharged from a hospital with an emergency department.
The closure, CEO Michael Kerr said in a phone interview, means that patients with these long-term acute care needs, which are often quite complex, will end up staying in traditional hospitals longer because there is one less place to transfer them.
Kerr said his hospital told staff of the closure Monday, and that it would no longer accept new patients. Its average patient length of stay is 25 days, he said, and the hospital will discharge all its patients before its proper closure set for Feb. 1.
Tentative plans exist for a new institution to emerge out of the closure, Kerr says—an inpatient rehab facility—but this would be at least 18 months out. He said the new facility, if actualized, would care for patients who could do substantial daily rehab, a generally healthier cohort than those currently served by Vibra Specialty Hospital of Portland.
Kerr said the factors forcing the closure include decreased reimbursement rates, rising expenses, Oregon’s minimum staffing laws, and, following major legislation, changes looming for the U.S. Medicaid marketplace that have introduced great uncertainty into the health care system—the sorts of dynamics that other Portland-area hospitals have been citing in recent months in their own announcements of layoffs and clinic closures.
The 310 workers getting laid off span a good deal of the health car spectrum, according to a WARN notice filed Monday with the state. Ninety-one registered nurses will lose their job, it says. So will 16 clinical assistants, 41 certified nursing assistants, 3 occupational therapists, 4 physical therapists, 5 speech language pathologists, and many more.
The workers are not represented by a union, the notice said.
The closure is also a blow to the Gateway district in East Portland, which has seen many of its landmark businesses shutter in recent years, as WW reported this summer.
Vibra Specialty Hospital of Portland opened in 2008 on the site of the former Woodland Park Hospital, according to an article in The Oregonian that year, noting that it was the first long-term acute care hospital in the state.
The hospital’s parent company, Vibra Healthcare, is a private Pennsylvania-based for profit corporation that specializes in long term care. Its website lists about 20 critical care and rehab hospitals around the U.S.
