Former employees and patients packed a town hall Monday, Aug. 31, demanding Oak Park's shuttered West Suburban Medical Center reopen. Organizers also called for state-level oversight of the court battle over the hospital's sale.
The gathering at Malcolm X College on Chicago's Near West Side drew community advocates, former hospital workers and patients who described a health care gap that neighboring facilities cannot fill, ABC7 Chicago reported. Organizers urged attendees to write letters to Gov. JB Pritzker asking the state to intervene and to the Cook County judge overseeing the case.
Sylvia Williams, a former nursing director who spent 20 years at West Suburban, spoke about patients left behind. "Nobody is saying anything about the patients," Williams said. "Nobody cares where the patients are going."
The hospital employed more than 700 people and its emergency room treated 70 to 80 patients a day before it shut down without warning March 25.
About 500 furloughed workers received permanent layoff notices effective Aug. 31, the same day as the town hall.
The event spotlighted growing tension over who would run the hospital if it reopens. Insight Health Systems, which acquired the former Mercy Hospital in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood for $1 in 2021, is the proposed buyer under a settlement deal negotiated in May.
Under those terms, West Suburban and Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood would be sold to Insight for $1, and Resilience Healthcare CEO Manoj Prasad would step down, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Insight president and CEO Atif Bawahab spoke at the town hall, saying the company would need to rely on former staff to reopen. But former West Suburban doctors pushed back. The West Suburban Medical Center Medical Executive Committee and Chicago Medical Society Task Force voted "no confidence" in Insight, citing concerns about transparency and accountability, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Two state lawmakers originally scheduled to speak pulled out hours before the event. Illinois Senate President Don Harmon and Illinois House Assistant Majority Leader Camille Y. Lilly said in a joint statement that organizers had added Insight executives to the program without informing them.
The legal battle remains unresolved. At an Aug. 25 hearing, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Patrick Stanton pressed Resilience's attorney on why Prasad had not finalized the May settlement, which was negotiated over four and a half hours in the judge's presence.
Property owner Ramco Healthcare filed an emergency motion alleging Prasad was illegally removing medical equipment from both hospitals, including ultrasound units, computers and blood pressure machines. "This isn't a hypothetical. It happened," Stanton told Resilience's attorney at that hearing, according to the Wednesday Journal.
A Tribune investigation published Sunday, Aug. 30, found Resilience received more than $24 million in state grants since buying the hospitals in 2022 while accumulating roughly $100 million in debts from state loans and unpaid taxes. The investigation found state officials missed warning signs when they approved the sale.
A federal license allowing West Suburban to receive Medicare and Medicaid funding is set to expire Sept. 30 if no corrective action is taken, according to an Illinois Department of Public Health inspection report. The next court date is Sept. 11.
