Mayo Clinic is closing its hospital and emergency department in the southwest Minnesota town of Springfield, citing troubles with recruiting patients and physicians to the medical center.
The hospital and ER, as well as clinics in the towns of Springfield and Lamberton, will close effective March 1, the clinic announced this week.
The closure in Springfield, which is about 125 miles southwest of the Twin Cities, is the latest example of how the Rochester-based health system has been consolidating health care operations across its network of hospitals and clinics in and around southern Minnesota. It fits with a national trend, as well, where more rural health care facilities are facing financial challenges.
"For the past several years, Mayo Clinic Health System in Springfield has experienced several challenges, including an inability to recruit and retain physicians, declining hospital admissions and extremely low use of the emergency department," the clinic said in a statement. "Despite robust efforts to implement a new care model in October 2018, many of those challenges remain, and the hospital and emergency department now face new concerns regarding future accreditation."
Minnesota has a proportionately larger number than other states of small critical-access hospitals in rural areas, but the latest financial data shows that many are struggling and that more than 30 meet the state Department of Health's definition of financially distressed. The most recent 2018 data for Mayo Springfield showed that it lost nearly $1.5 million that year and had a negative operating margin of 10.8%.
Mayo Clinic is Minnesota's largest private employer with a five-state network of hospitals and clinics. Mayo announced in August that it would close a clinic in La Crescent, Minn., and it moved labor and delivery this year from its hospital in Albert Lea to its Austin facility. In October, Mayo said it would close its clinic in the northeast Iowa town of Waukon this month.
In Springfield, the hospital thus far in 2019 has admitted nine inpatients plus another 28 patients for overnight observation, clinic officials say. They add that the ER has been seeing a daily average of three to four patients.
Part of the problem was staffing, as the Mayo Clinic hospital in Springfield had hired three search firms in the past five years to address physician shortages and financial losses. An attempt to transfer management to the Avera McKennan system in South Dakota fell through, so the hospital proceeded last year with a plan for all care to be provided by nurse practitioners and physician assistants with videoconferencing guidance as needed from Mayo doctors in Rochester and Mankato.