Annabelle Covington, a registered nurse, addresses the board of directors of Watsonville Community Hospital on Wednesday, Jan. 14. She urged them to to prevent the closure of the intensive care unit. (Fidel M. Soto — Noticias Watsonville)

Editor’s note: This article first appeared as an episode of Noticias Watsonville.

WATSONVILLE >> About a dozen nurses rallied outside Watsonville Community Hospital on Wednesday after its leaders said the intensive care unit may need to close amid a failure to staff up its night shift nurses. 

The nurses gathered ahead of a special board meeting and raised the alarm about the potential impacts that the closure of the city’s only ICU could have on patients.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” Leticia Ornelas, a nurse who’s worked at the hospital for 35 years, told Noticias Watsonville in Spanish. “I think that for me, the most logical thing would be for them to cut other areas, perhaps in administration or management, but never in intensive care.”

She said ICU nurses were told last Thursday that the department could close within three days. 

At Wednesday’s board meeting, hospital leaders insisted the department was not closing. The formal closure of a hospital department would be a longer process, said Tony Nuñez, board president of the Pajaro Valley Health Care District, which operates the hospital. 

They were able to put together a staffing plan to keep the department open for the next four weeks, he said, and will meet with the nurse union representatives in the coming weeks to try to find a longer term solution.

Watsonville Community Hospital last year faced a series of financial setbacks, the biggest impacts coming from federal cuts to Medicaid and state cuts to Medi-Cal. They have struggled to retain doctors and nurses.

Nuñez said he’s hoping the hospital can benefit from $233 million for rural health centers that California received from the federal government.

“We need some of those dollars to help us through this really challenging financial time,” he said.

Hospital leaders are hoping to finalize a plan in the next several months to have a larger health care corporation take over the hospital’s operations “to allow us to weather the unprecedented storm that we’re going to see in health care,” Nuñez told Santa Cruz Local in November.

Ornelas, the nurse, said the ICU is critical for patient care. If it closes, residents needing intensive care will have to be transferred to hospitals in Santa Cruz, San José or Salinas.

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