Take a look inside Watsonville’s hospital as community weighs support for $116M bond

As the director of Watsonville Community Hospital’s radiology department, Nelida Trout-Lacy has seen the ways the hospital has been a lifeline for people with serious diseases – including her own parents. 

Trout-Lacy’s mother and father both have long-term diabetes and have needed significant treatments and surgeries, including amputations, at the hospital. 

So when the MRI unit was down for eight days in October – and last June, when the CT scanner was down for almost three weeks – Trout-Lacy was on edge thinking about her parents, and the community. 

About eight patients use the MRI unit a day on average and about 40 patients use the CT scanner – and that’s without counting emergency department patients, like those who might be having a stroke. 

The hospital’s MRI and the CT scanner have both broken down for weeks at a time. The MRI unit is about 12 years old and the CT scanner is six years old. Both are difficult to fix because their parts aren’t easily obtainable, Trout-Lacy said. 

When the equipment goes down, that means sending patients north to Santa Cruz’s Dominican Hospital, or if Dominican is full, they have to find a different nearby option, delaying treatment for emergencies when rapid medical intervention can make a critical difference. 

“This is my fear,” Trout-Lacy said. “If my mom or dad were to have a stroke and [our equipment] is down, I’m not calling an ambulance [to get them to Watsonville hospital]. I’m rushing them to whatever hospital I can take them to.”

Purchasing new equipment like a CT scanner is among the list of improvements hospital leaders say they could implement if voters on Tuesday pass Measure N, a $116 million bond measure on the ballot for nearly 47,000 registered voters within the Pajaro Valley Health Care District, which stretches from southern Aptos to Pajaro. 

Hospital leaders also plan to use the money to purchase the land the hospital sits on from its Alabama-based owners, redirecting the $3 million in annual rent payments toward hospital services. The money would also go toward doubling the size of the emergency room and replacing the hospital’s old plumbing and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, which haven’t been updated since the building was constructed 26 years ago. 

The hope, they say, is to not only enhance care but attract patients who would have otherwise sought care elsewhere. That could help bring in more revenue for a hospital whose population base of 117,575 is 60% Hispanic and made up predominantly of patients covered under government programs that typically pay far less than private insurance plans. 

“The purpose of Measure N is to ensure long-term viability of a hospital for this community,” said Dr. John Walther, who has been an emergency department physician at the hospital for the past 42 years and plans to vote yes on N. “The alternative, if you take no hospital, [is] our patients have to go somewhere. We’re in a part of the county where a lot of people don’t have the transportation or the finances to do that.” 

But the past 20 years of turmoil as the hospital traded hands among private, for-profit owners until declaring bankruptcy in 2021 have built up a well of dissatisfaction among some patients and former staff. Some have left for jobs at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz or elsewhere because of problems with past management. Patients also point to long wait times for the emergency room and negative experiences with the hospital’s overworked staff.

That could prove to be a hurdle for the ballot measure’s supporters. They need more than two-thirds of the district’s voters to say yes to hiking their annual property taxes by an extra $24 per $100,000 of assessed value less than two years after the community already raised close to $65 million to return the hospital to public ownership.

Hospital nurses, doctors describe the potential impacts of $116 million

Doctors and other workers at the hospital told Lookout that the $116 million bond would have a great impact on the quality of service they provide. Many spoke about the importance of purchasing the hospital building and the land it sits on.

Susy Adams, a registered nurse at the hospital since 2001, said if the bond was going toward just buying the hospital land, that would be worth it on its own. “It was the saddest day of my life when I found out that the [owners] sold our land,” she said. “That was to me the moment that we lost our hospital.”

Others pointed to the need to replace the aging plumbing, HVAC system and roof. 

Almost 900 babies are born at the hospital every year on average. About five years ago, staff in the neonatal intensive care unit had to relocate five or six babies because there was concern that flooding from the roof would leak into the nursery. The neonatal intensive care unit takes care of premature babies who have complications that require special, around-the-clock care.

When the roof began leaking, registered nurse Silvia Perez recalled that she and other nurses rolled the carts holding the babies with their monitors to the other side of the nursery floor. They had them in the other unit for about two to three hours while the flooding was resolved. 

“That is an unusual thing that shouldn’t happen in a hospital,” she said, adding that there hasn’t been another scare like that. 

Perez has worked at the hospital for more than 30 years and in that time, she’s seen the hospital’s infrastructure deteriorate, particularly in the last 20 years of for-profit ownership as more than 20 CEOs filtered through. 

Watsonville residents Carmelita Santa and James Santa say they plan to vote yes on Measure N. James said it’s important that the hospital replace its aging equipment and renovate the building’s infrastructure. 

Generally, they said, they’ve had good experiences going to the hospital, except for long wait times in the emergency room. “I’ve been in the emergency a couple of times and you just sit there for hours and hours and hours,” said James. 

Walther, the ER physician, said using the bond money to add 10 or so beds to the emergency department is a high priority. With its current 13 beds, the emergency department is designed for about 25,000 patients a year, he said, but last year it served 35,000. 

ER staff regularly see full waiting rooms and often have to make decisions on who needs the most urgent attention, causing long wait times for other patients. 

“It’s a horrible feeling to have a waiting room and people leaving,” Walther said. “They come in and they say ‘Oh, my chest pain is not that bad, I think I’ll see my doctor Monday.’ Then they have a major cardiac event over the weekend.”

Some community members are certain about Measure N, some aren’t

Maria Basurto is the owner of Maria’s Dulceria, a store on the downtown Watsonville Plaza selling food, clothing and souvenirs from Mexico. She said keeping the hospital open is essential for the community’s economy and for the physical health of local residents. 

At the same time, Basurto had a negative experience last year when she went to the emergency room for a bad case of vertigo. She said it took five hours to get admitted and a nurse was very condescending to her. 

When a nurse called her name to be admitted, the nurse told her to stand up. “I told her I’m in a wheelchair, I can’t stand up. That’s why I’m using it, because if I stand up I’m going to fall,” she recalled telling the nurse. “She grabbed the wheelchair in a very bad mood and she took me in.” 

A former Watsonville hospital certified nursing assistant (CNA), Maricela Bonilla said she understands the experience that Basurto described. 

“The nurses are exhausted,” she said. “[The community] maybe doesn’t understand that they can be working there for 12 hours. [They] can be putting in more time because someone has called in sick, or they don’t want to work because of the pay.” 

Bonilla worked at the hospital for about 2½ years before taking a job at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz in February 2020 because of higher pay and a more stable workplace. 

Watsonville Community Hospital had gone through several owners and management teams, causing “chaos.” 

“They held up our pay,” she said. “I remember one year they didn’t send out our [tax slips] and it was hard for us to get our taxes done – and this was going on throughout the hospital.” 

Bonilla said that she’s heard from former colleagues that working conditions at the hospital have improved since it transitioned to public ownership. 

At Dominican Hospital, she said she’s earning over $41 an hour now, compared to the $23 an hour she was making when she left Watsonville Community Hospital. Communication with her managers is also better, and Dominican provides uniforms for CNAs, unlike at Watsonville. 

Despite her challenges working at Watsonville hospital, Bonilla said she and her family have had only positive experiences as patients there and that she plans to vote yes on Measure N. 

When her son had a lung infection, Bonilla said her first instinct was to take her son to Watsonville hospital rather than to Dominican. Hospital staff put her son through the CT scanner and later transferred him to Stanford University’s children’s hospital for further treatment.

“I wasn’t going to take him all the way over [to Dominican] just because people think it’s better,” she said. “They did the same thing. They provide the same things.” 

Maria Basurto, however, said she hasn’t yet decided how to vote on Measure N. 

She had five of her six children at Watsonville Community Hospital and each time the nurses were very sweet. So she was surprised to have a bad experience last year. 

“We have to have a hospital because we never know when we’re going to need it,” she said. But, she added: “I still don’t know, I can’t tell you if I’m going to vote for the tax or not. We’ll have to see.”

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.