El Dorado Hospital will close in two weeks — months sooner than expected — so its owner, TMC HealthCare, can remake it into a nursing home and center for patients who need long-term hospital care.
TMC HealthCare, which also owns Tucson Medical Center, said in May it would close El Dorado by the end of the year. But on Friday the parent organization said El Dorado will close Aug. 18, to make it easier and safer to begin renovations.
The new El Dorado should be ready for patients by the first of next year, TMC spokeswoman Julia Strange said.
El Dorado, 1400 N. Wilmot Road, will no longer admit patients after Aug. 14 except through its emergency room. By Aug. 18, patients who still need hospital care will be transferred to TMC, 5301 E. Grant Road, or another hospital of their choice, Strange said.
El Dorado's emergency room will see patients through Aug. 18 but will refer them elsewhere if they need to be hospitalized.
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Hospital officials told El Dorado's nurses and other employees Friday they will be offered jobs at TMC that will pay as much as the jobs they have now. They also will be able to apply for new jobs at El Dorado when its new services open.
El Dorado administrator Martha Gerganoff, who came to the hospital as a critical-care nurse in 1984, will move to TMC as its new administrator — a job that puts her second-in-command to CEO Frank Alvarez.
About 500 El Dorado employees also will be affected by the change.
"We're doing our best to keep people 'whole' during this transition," Gerganoff said Friday. For example, the hospitals are trying to accommodate people who want to work certain shifts, and others who carpool and want to work at the same times on the same days, Gerganoff said.
Joe Akif, a nurse and El Dorado's emergency department director, said after Friday morning's employee meeting that the transition seemed to be going well for most people.
"For a lot of the employees who are long-term, it brought finality to where this journey has been going," Akif said. "It's a little tough for some but I think for other people it's helped, because they now understand what the direction of the organization is."
With the nation's 78 million baby boomers beginning to enter their retirement years, health-care organizations around the country are looking for new ways to serve them, Richard Rodriguez, TMC's chief medical officer, said then.
That includes building more nursing homes and more "long-term acute-care" hospitals for patients who need a higher level of care than is usually offered in nursing homes.
Long-term acute care often is for patients in comas who require ventilators to keep breathing.
Ideas for El Dorado originally included an expansion of its Generations psychiatric program for seniors and the addition of an urgent-care center, also geared toward seniors.
The new plan is to transfer Generations to Palo Verde Hospital, the psychiatric hospital at 2695 N. Craycroft Road on the TMC campus and owned by TMC HealthCare.
Although the new urgent-care center at El Dorado will be geared toward seniors, it will accept patients of all ages, Strange said.
El Dorado's rehabilitation and physical-therapy services will be transferred to HealthSouth Rehabilitation Institute of Tucson, 2650 N. Wyatt Drive, just west of TMC but not owned by TMC HealthCare.
TMC, meanwhile, has increased its number of beds from about 450 to about 500, Strange said. TMC also has streamlined its emergency-room procedures to reduce waiting times, and revised its operating-room schedule to accommodate more surgeries, she said.
TMC HealthCare purchased El Dorado Hospital for $32 million in December 2003.
TMC also plans to build 100-bed Rincon Community Hospital to open in about two years at Civano, at South Houghton and East Drexel roads. And it intends to rebuild TMC, replacing the sprawling one-story hospital with a seven-story bed tower and other structures to open in 2012.
Those projects are expected to cost about $400 million — a major reason for consolidating TMC and El Dorado, hospital officials said in May.
