Closing Delaware County Memorial Hospital wasn’t proved to cause ‘irreparable harm’ to community, appeals court rules

A foundation that tried to block last year’s closure of Delaware County Memorial Hospital, part of Crozer Health, did not prove that the closure would cause irreparable harm to the community, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The Commonwealth Court ruling has no immediate impact, given that the Drexel Hill hospital’s emergency department and its inpatient units have been closed since the state Department of Health in early November ordered the facility to stop accepting patients because it lacked staff.

Crozer, which was acquired by California-based Prospect Medical Holdings Inc. in 2016, said it was pleased by the appeals court ruling.

Last September, the company announced plans to turn Delaware County Memorial into a behavioral health facility, plus an urgent care center and other services. On Wednesday, the company did not say how quickly it would bring those plans to fruition.

Crozer has said that Delaware County Memorial has consistently lost money. In a span of 10 years through 2021, the number of inpatient discharges at Delaware County Memorial fell by half, to 5,662, according an Inquirer analysis of state data.

The Foundation for Delaware County, which represents the legal interests of the nonprofit that sold Crozer to Prospect, won a preliminary injunction in the Delaware County Court of Common Please in October blocking Prospect from closing the emergency department and ending general inpatient services at the hospital. The foundation said the plan violated the 2016 sales agreement, which required Prospect to keep Crozer’s hospitals open for at least 10 years.

The Commonwealth Court, in a decision written by Judge Ellen Ceisler, said testimony by Melissa Lyon, the Delaware County Health Department’s public health director, was insufficient.

“This testimony is markedly devoid of the concrete evidence necessary to legally justify Common Pleas’ irreparable harm determination,” Ceisler wrote. Judge Lori A. Dumas joined Ceisler in the 2-1 opinion.

Ceisler said in her opinion that in the future, more evidence might show that the closure of Delaware County Memorial endangered “community members’ ability to receive emergency medical treatment in a timely manner, irreparably harming their health and, indeed, their lives.”

The third judge on the panel, Patricia A. McCullough, dissented, saying that Ceisler and Dumas asked too much.

Frances Sheehan, president of the Foundation for Delaware County, said she was disappointed by the ruling.

“We think that irreparable harm to the community is obvious. We’ll be regrouping and deciding our next steps,” she said.