How ChesPenn, a federal health clinic in Chester, is faring since Crozer Health's closure last year
The nonprofit health clinic says it is Chester's only provider of primary care since Crozer Health went out of business. Obstetrics remain a challenge.
Chester lost many services that residents had depended on for generations when Crozer Health went out of business last year during the bankruptcy of its for-profit owner, Prospect Medical Holdings Inc.
“We lost the emergency room, we lost trauma, we lost the burn unit, we lost specialty services, but we did not lose primary care,” said Susan Harris-McGovern, who is president and CEO of ChesPenn Health Services Inc., which has clinics in Chester and Upper Darby.
The Chester clinic, with 10 doctors, nurse-practitioners, and dentists on staff, wants the community to know that it is seeing a steady flow of new patients.
ChesPenn is nonprofit federally-qualified health center, which means it offers a sliding payment scale for uninsured patients. Such clinics are essential parts of the healthcare safety net in high-poverty area, such as Chester.
Before the closure, doctors delivering babies at Crozer-Chester Medical Center would see maternity patients at ChesPenn for routine care. Now many pregnant patients are going elsewhere, resulting in a decline in the overall number of patients at the clinic.
A family medicine doctor on ChesPenn’s staff still cares for uninsured pregnant patients “because they have nowhere else to go,” Harris-McGovern said.
The challenge comes in finding places for those patients to deliver their babies, said Karen Breitmayer, ChesPenn’s director of grants, data and project management. Some also need hard-to-come-by specialty care during their pregnancies.
“Crozer for a lot of years, even when they became for-profit, they knew this community and they worked with us. They worked with those patients,” Breitmayer said.
Transportation remains a huge problem. It’s not so far from Chester to Main Line Health’s Riddle Hospital in Media, said Harris-McGovern, “but there’s no direct path for our patients for OB to have access to care.”