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Sacred Heart Medical Center and Holy Family Hospital, both under the umbrella of Spokane-based Providence Services, are seeking state permission to open a 25-bed transitional-care unit at Holy Family.
Holy Family is proposing to spend about $1.2 million to set up the unit, which would occupy about 8,000 square feet of floor space on the hospital's fourth floor. It says the unit would provide a seven- to 10-day interim care environment for patients, often elderly, who aren't sick enough to require standard hospital acute care, but who need a higher level of nursing attention than that typically provided at nursing homes.
A Holy Family executive claims that having such a unit there makes sense because it would be less unsettling for patients and more convenient for doctors than moving the patients to long-term care facilities that offer subacute care.
However, executives for a number of private, skilled-nursing facilities on the North Side question the need for the beds, which would be heavily Medicare supported, and say they view the request as a financially motivated effort by the hospitals to make up for declining acute-care patient admissions.
They claim their facilities are equally capable of providing that same degree of care with current beds and staff, and they note that the state already considers Spokane County to have a surplus of licensed skilled-nursing beds, which are...