Two executives who led St. Vincent Charity’s recent transformation from a hospital to an outpatient health campus have been fired, the Sisters of Charity Health System, which operates the nearly 200-year-old medical campus in Cleveland's Central neighborhood, confirmed Thursday.
Susanna Krey, senior vice president at the Sisters of Charity Health System, and Heather Stoll, the senior vice president for strategy and innovation for the St. Vincent Charity Health Campus, were key leaders in the health system’s shift from operating St. Vincent as a full-service hospital to an outpatient care provider with plans to create a health campus the system said focused on community needs.
St. Vincent ceased operating as a hospital in November, shuttering much of its inpatient care and its emergency department. The psychiatric emergency room at St. Vincent's remained open with funds from the Alcohol Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Cuyahoga County fund.
Although, public health officials said the decision to close the ER was sound from a public health perspective, residents of the Central neighborhood have called the decision to close the emergency room “devastating.”
Despite health system efforts to tell the public about the changes at St. Vincent's, an Ideastream Public Media investigation showed that many residents in the nearby neighborhood were unaware the emergency room had closed and were arriving at the former location seeking emergency care for everything from chest pain to bullet wounds.
When asked about the terminations, leaders at the Sisters of Charity said the health system is going through a period of change.
Krey and Stoll’s terminations were “part of the restructuring currently underway to evaluate the services we provide,” President and CEO Janice Murphy said in a statement. Murphy would not elaborate on the specific reasons why the women were let go, citing health system policy.
On Friday, Murphy and the Sisters of Charity Health System Board Chair Robert Varley told stakeholders the health system is “reevaluating the direction of the Health Campus concept,” Murphy said. In the statement, she added, “it does not mean our commitment to this initiative has wavered.”
The leadership changes will not affect the organization’s plan, announced this week, to open a primary care office with Neighborhood Family Practice, a Federally Qualified Health Center, with eight locations on Cleveland’s West Side, Murphy said. Under the plan, NFP will provide preventative medicine and primary care, primarily to patients who are poor or uninsured.
St. Vincent leaders wanted to expand health care access in the neighborhood, said Domonic Hopson, NFP's president and CEO.
“The key for us is just really having people feel when they come to see us that they feel valued, that they feel that we are intentional about providing great care to them,” he said.
The primary care doctor’s office is scheduled to open in January 2024 at a medical office complex across the street from St. Vincent on East 22nd Street, the hospital system said.
