From struggling to flourishing, Mee Memorial Hospital is a pandemic success story.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic showed up at Mee Memorial Hospital’s doorstep, the small, rural hospital in King City was facing immense challenges. Administrators cut 13 percent of the hospital’s workforce in July 2019, due to cuts in Medicare, Medi-Cal and private insurance reimbursements. When shelter-in-place began in March 2020, newly minted CEO Rena Salamacha realized the only way to remain open was to cut even more.

Salamacha rightly predicted that fearful patients weren’t going to come to the nonprofit hospital and its clinics in King City and Greenfield unless the situation was dire. Clinic visits slowed to a trickle. “We responded quickly and very early. We had to make a lot of difficult decisions,” she says. She cut another 18 percent of the workforce in April 2020 and the management team took the equivalent of a 10-percent pay cut. “Those decisions are why we are still standing and growing today.”

The focus in the clinics was on primary care. Other services that weren’t making money were eliminated, including obstetrics/gynecology, which had been seeing a steady decline in patients since 2011. It was tough to suspend it, Salamacha says, but it was necessary. “We looked at [the cuts] as an opportunity to buckle down.”

The strategy worked and Mee Memorial lived to celebrate its 60th anniversary in July. Other rural hospitals were not as fortunate. A record 19 rural hospitals across the country closed in 2020, according to a recent report by the American Hospital Association. (A total of 136 closed between 2010 and 2021.) Remaining rural hospitals like Mee Memorial were bolstered by the federal CARES Act, Paycheck Protection Program and other federal funds made available to health care organizations. Mee Memorial has received a combined total of $7.5 million since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the Health Resources and Services Administration. Part of that money is being used to advertise services to the region. Salamacha says they have become more involved in the community than previously.

OB/GYN services came back this fall three days a week, says Heidi Pattison, director of outpatient clinics. (Patients still have to travel to Natividad in Salinas for delivery.) Many laid-off staff members have returned, two new physicians were added to the hospital’s clinic in Greenfield, as well as a nurse practitioner. Clinic patients have returned, at over 100 visits per day. “Now we’re jamming again,” Pattison says.

In November, hospital leadership broke ground on the Mee Memorial Children’s Health and Wellness Center on hospital grounds near the corner of Broadway and Canal streets in King City, which, when it opens, possibly by March, will be South County’s only clinic focused solely on pediatrics. It’s a remodel of an existing structure, costing just over $1 million, with 55 percent of it paid for by grants. Pattison estimates the clinic will experience around 6,000 visits per year.

In March they are scheduled to break ground on an expansion of the emergency and diagnostic imaging departments. That construction is expected to be completed by summer 2024. “We didn’t put our blinders on during the pandemic,” Salamacha says. “We looked at how we do our current care, but also how can we grow that?”