Community members, former hospital staff and local officials convened Monday night at the Oak Park Public Library to make their voices heard regarding the closing of West Suburban Medical Center.
The crowd of about 50 people also began to devise a plan that would address public health in the absence of the hospital, which was abruptly shuttered last month after hospital ownership cited financial distress.
People expressed their frustrations and concerns, and wondered if they can trust Manoj Prasad, the owner of West Suburban Medical Center, who said the hospital closed in part because of a billing system failure which caused the hospital to not collect all of its payments for about a year.
While most wanted the hospital to reopen, some expressed hope they would also have input on changes they feel are needed at the facility.
Then they got to work, planning breakout group sessions to address staff concerns and the hospital’s financial situation, community needs, political/legislative issues, and the legalities and the leadership model of the hospital.
The event was hosted by area doctors Theresa Chapple and Mohi Ahmed.
Though Ahmed has never worked at West Suburban, he wanted to host an event for the community and what to do moving forward. Over the next few weeks, Ahmed said the goal is for the people in the breakout groups to organize and create plans and ideas and quantify the needs of the community, and then bring everyone back together.
“There was a moment where people got together and resolved to work, that’s the note we ended on,” Ahmed said. “We’re going to hopefully continue that momentum moving forward.”
Former West Suburban doctor Dominic Robolino, who began his residency at the hospital in 2024, said he had concerns about the place even before it closed. He said the facilities, services and the medical equipment were lacking, and he was not able to get the full experience that he was looking for.
Robolino said he and other employees tried unionizing to advocate for the safety of their patients, but those efforts were unsuccessful.
“Dr. Prasad refused to meet with us and we filed multiple unfair labor practices due to his inability and unwillingness to negotiate with our union, and then eventually our residency program got shut down and turned to nothing,” Robolino said.
The hospital shutdown did not come as a surprise to him, though he wished something would have changed when he was advocating a year ago.
“It’s just very frustrating, very difficult, but it just felt like the word was not really getting out and that nothing was changing,” he said. “Things were just kind of steadily deteriorating over time. We could see it happening before our eyes, but felt like we couldn’t do anything about it.”
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Last week, Prasad said at a news conference he hopes to reopen the hospital in the summer, but state Rep. La Shawn Ford expressed doubts, saying there’s no guarantee that it will happen.
Those at the meeting on Monday were preparing for any outcome.
“I really want to have something concrete that we can share on July 15, where we say ‘We waited until mid July, this didn’t open as stated, and so this is what we now need,’” said Chapple, the other doctor who organized the event.
When Prasad announced March 25 that the hospital would close in two days and patients would be transferred to other facilities or released, it came as a surprise to most patients.
At Monday’s meeting, Cook County Commissioner Tara Stamps decried Prasad’s handling of the closure and said more should have been done to alert the community about the hospital’s financial condition, and to prepare people for the possibility of its closure.
Stamps said she alerted the community and organized meetings last year to let people know what was happening and what was to come.
“We did some door knocking, community meetings around to say ‘Yo, if this is happening now, then there’s grave concern about overall future of the hospital,'” Stamps said.
The support from people at Monday’s meeting would have been ideal for her a year ago, with the additional support from elected officials, she said.
She called the meeting ambitious, but said she wasn’t optimistic about the hospital’s future given how things had been handled thus far.
“It’s a travesty, but more is coming,” she said.