South Valley has two full-service, acute-care hospitals: Hazel
Hawkins Memorial Hospital in Hollister and Saint Louise Regional
Hospital in Gilroy. Although both are small by big-city standards,
they’re proud of the important health care services they offer to
relatively rural communities.
South Valley has two full-service, acute-care hospitals: Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital in Hollister and Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy. Although both are small by big-city standards, they’re proud of the important health care services they offer to relatively rural communities.
“We’re the only emergency facility in (San Benito) county,” said Ken Underwood, CEO of Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital. “We have a very busy emergency room.”
Likewise, since the closure of Morgan Hill’s Saint Louise Hospital, Gilroy’s Saint Louise Regional Hospital (formerly South Valley Hospital) boasts the only emergency room in south Santa Clara County.
Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital
Founded in 1907, the hospital is named for the granddaughter of the man who started the facility. T. S. Hawkins founded the hospital after his 9-year-old granddaughter, a San Benito County resident, died in 1902 from appendicitis due to the lack of an area hospital.
The hospital became a district hospital, owned by the people of San Benito County, in 1957. Because it’s a district hospital, property owners in San Benito County pay property tax to support the facility and residents elect a five-member board of trustees.
“Approximately 98 percent of our funding is from patient revenue. Less than 2 percent comes from property taxes,” Underwood said. “Our property taxes come to $800,000 a year.”
In the past few years, the hospital, which has 49 acute-care beds, has added new mammography equipment, new radiology imaging screening equipment and remodeled the intensive care unit, among other improvements, Underwood said.
“We also just opened a $9 million skilled nursing/rehabilitation facility,” he added. “It offers long-term care.”
The hospital is looking to the future. It hopes to achieve official ‘Level 3’ designation for its emergency room in the near future. Level 3 emergency rooms are comprehensive facilities that can handle any medical emergency and have high-tech equipment and specialists on duty at all times.
“We are functioning as a Level 3 emergency room,” Underwood said. “If we get the Level 3 designation, we could get some additional funding.”
Besides the emergency room designation, the hospital is in the process of obtaining new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment.
“We hope to start construction … expanding the hospital by 2,000 square feet to house a new GE MRI scanner,” Underwood said, noting that the scanner itself costs $1.6 million, and the expansion construction will cost another $1.1 million.
The hospital, part of the San Benito Health Care District, also plans to open a clinic in San Juan Bautista, which currently has no medical practitioners.
“We hope to open a clinic on June 1,” Underwood said. “Initially, it will be open five days a week.”
The health district hopes to find a full-time general practitioner, a part-time pediatrician and a physician’s assistant or nurse practitioner to staff the clinic.
“We’re still looking and interviewing candidates,” Underwood said.
The hospital would like to build a 7,200-square-foot ambulatory surgery center, but is “in line” for building permits, which are difficult to obtain right now due to water problems in San Benito County.
Saint Louise Regional Hospital
South County’s only hospital, Saint Louise Regional Hospital has 93 acute-care beds and 21 sub-acute beds, said Vivian Smith, the hospital’s director of community and public relations.
The hospital has been the focus of much controversy in recent years with the closure of the first Saint Louise Hospital in Morgan Hill and the recent transfer of ownership of both the Gilroy hospital and the closed Morgan Hill facility from Catholic Healthcare West to Daughters of Charity (which founded the Morgan Hill hospital).
Despite the turmoil, the hospital remains focused on its values and mission, Smith said.
“Saint Louise Regional Hospital is to be the center for health and healing for our communities and to nurture the spiritual and physical well being of all,” she said.
Those values – which include advocacy for the poor – mean the nonprofit hospital will treat any patient, regardless of his or her ability to pay.
“Just from July to December of last year, we performed several million dollars worth of charity care,” Smith said.
The hospital focuses on the whole patient, including his or her spirituality. To that end, the Saint Louise has a spiritual care team that many patients find to be a great comfort, Smith said.
“Their presence is a constant support to patients, families and the hospital staff,” she said.
Saint Louise Regional Hospital is owned by Los Altos-based Daughters of Charity Health System, which runs six hospitals in California, including O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, Seton Medical Center in Daly City, Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne, St. Vincent Medical Center in Los Angeles and St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood.
Saint Louise staff are excited about new MRI equipment, which the hospital obtained a few months ago.
“The new … system features some of the most comprehensive clinical capabilities in the industry,” Smith said. “The MRI gives us much more diagnostic capability, including diagnosing strokes sooner, seeing carpal tunnel syndrome and soft tissue masses.”
Saint Louise’s Breast Care Center, housed in one of the hospital’s two medical office buildings, offers advanced breast cancer diagnosis using mammograms, biopsies, ultrasound and cyst aspirations, Smith said.
It allows women to have many diagnostic procedures in an outpatient environment without stepping foot into the hospital itself.
In addition, the hospital’s Maternal Child Health Services include a breastfeeding specialist and labor and delivery nurses who are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to answer questions from expectant and new mothers.
As they look to the future, Saint Louise administrators are studying ways to best use the now-empty hospital in Morgan Hill. A study is under way to provide recommendations on that issue, Smith said, but she could not estimate when a report would be ready.
In the meantime, the DOC has reopened a medical office building at the old Saint Louise Hospital, where two doctors are now practicing.
“We hope to see more doctors in that space,” Smith said.
For more information on Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital and Saint Louis Regional Hospital, visit www.hazelhawkins.com nadwww.dochs.org.
