Quick Take
Santa Cruz County’s largest hospital needs help, writes retired nurse Elizabeth Gordon. The hard-working, dedicated nurses and staff are being pushed to exhaustion. Patients are ending up with long waits in the emergency room or hallway beds due to overcrowding. Ambulances often get diverted for lack of space, affecting the county's overall needs. Gordon calls on Dominican Hospital’s leadership to do better.
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Santa Cruz’s Dominican Hospital’s emergency department is having an emergency.
What is happening at Dominican Hospital (now part of CommonSpirit Health, formerly Dignity Health) is a betrayal to the community and its hard-working emergency department staff and a concern we must address.
We’ve lived in Santa Cruz County for over 32 years and are proud to call it home. My husband and I have a combined 45 years of experience — he as a firefighter/paramedic and myself as a nurse. We understand how the health care and hospital system is supposed to work. As one of the largest health care organizations, CommonSpirit Health claims to be “building healthy communities, advocating for the poor and vulnerable, and innovating how and where healing happens.”
Yet Dominican’s reality tells a much different story.
Santa Cruz County’s population, now more than 260,000, is outgrowing its infrastructure at an unsustainable rate. There are numerous housing developments projected and already in progress. As a major tourist destination, the influx of visitors further overwhelms the area, increasing the population during peak seasons. The increasing elderly population, along with the many nursing facilities, floods the hospital with older adults in true need. The homeless population adds another layer of complexity.
The county has only three hospitals: Dominican Hospital, Sutter Maternity & Surgery Center and Watsonville Community Hospital. Only two facilities — Dominican and Watsonville — have emergency departments.
Dominican’s ER, with just 24 beds and many unlicensed hall beds, is woefully undersized. Watsonville’s ER offers only 13 beds.
Add to this that Dominican is the only hospital in the area with a cardiac/stroke center, making it, thankfully, the linchpin for life-saving care in the county.
On a daily basis, Dominican holds “admitted patients” in its ER because there are no available hospital rooms. This leads to people sitting in the lobby for five-to-seven-hour wait periods.
This is not just inconvenient — it’s risky.
The overcrowding creates a perilous environment for patients and staff, with space and resources stretched to the breaking point.
Ambulances often can wait 30 minutes or more to offload patients, forcing Dominican into ambulance diversion (where patients are sent to Watsonville ER). This situation can impact the entire county, delaying 911 services for anyone in need.
The strain is only getting worse.
Staffing is a continuous issue. The corporate takeover by CommonSpirit Health has done nothing but worsen the situation. Currently there is a focus on cutting staffing instead of any plans of expanding the hospital – which is bursting at the seams and sadly unequipped to handle the health demand of Santa Cruz County’s population, graying and otherwise.
Nurses and support staff are left to fight a losing battle. They are heroically dedicated to serving patients while being pushed beyond human capacity. How can they be expected to tend to peoples’ lives when they are starved of support?
Their dedication and commitment to patient care, even in the face of overwhelming challenges, is truly admirable.
Dominican’s leadership has failed and must face the truth: This hospital is in a crisis and it’s their responsibility to fix it. The question is, how much longer will CommonSpirit allow the hospital, staff and community to suffer before taking real action?
The answers seem clear: Planning for and building a larger hospital and hiring more staff that matches the community’s growth and needs coupled with an understanding and awareness of the population they serve both outside and inside the hospital.
The time for excuses is over. It is time to truly embody their slogan of “humankindness” so it is more than just a marketing ploy.
Elizabeth Gordon spent 18 years as a nurse. She lives in Santa Cruz with her husband, a retired firefighter/paramedic.
