As a Hudson Valley hospital begins the process of reducing its bed capacity, employees are worried about the future.
Rob Anderson is an X-ray technician. He’s worked at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson for 15 years. During a conversation in his Stuyvesant backyard recently, he said the mood amongst the staff these days is tense.
"People are gossiping," Anderson said. "Rumors are flying all the time."
Last year, Albany Med Health System, the larger company that Columbia Memorial is affiliated with, began the process of applying for reclassification. They want to transition Columbia Memorial to something called a Critical Access Hospital. If they’re successful, it will enable the hospital to get higher reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid patients – up to 101%, as opposed to the 50-70% they currently receive.
But, the Critical Access classification is designed for rural hospitals – that means hospitals that want the classification have to meet certain criteria. One of them is that they can only have a maximum of 25 inpatient beds. Columbia Memorial currently has 192.
Albany Med said Columbia Memorial doesn’t need all those beds. They said the hospital averages just 40-50 patients a day. This change, according to their proposal, “aligns resources with actual demand.”
Anderson disagrees.
"That is a blatant fabrication on the part of the CEO, the administration, and Albany Med," he said. "We actually need more beds. People end up boarding in the emergency room for days at a time because we don't have the beds upstairs to put them in."
For a month earlier this summer, Columbia Memorial staffers – many of whom, including Anderson, are represented by 1199SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, started doing their own patient counts, and contrasting them with the hospital’s official numbers.
According to the staff counts from that period, CMH consistently reported about twice as many empty beds as what employees were seeing. Sometimes, employees allege the discrepancy was even wider. On June 15, for example, CMH said there were 33 available beds. Staff counted only 4.
"We go all over the hospital," Anderson said. "We go to the operating room. We do portable X-rays on all the floors. We go to the ICU. We go to the recovery room. We see how many patients are in the hospital. ... 75 beds is normal for us to have occupied."
Albany Med did not reply to a request for comment on the difference between their numbers and the staff count. But in their public messaging about why they want to reclassify the hospital, they said the vast majority of their patients have government insurance. Getting higher reimbursement rates for those patients, they claim, will “enable reinvestment in staff, services, and facilities.”
But Anderson said since Columbia Memorial became affiliated with Albany Med, all of those things have gone downhill.
When it comes to services, Anderson points to the example of urology. He said both of their practitioners retired and then Albany Med brought in more from the Albany area. Anderson said they don't want to travel down to Columbia County.
"So now, if you have that problem, you come in the emergency room and you have a kidney stone, and it's not on a weekday between 8 [a.m.] and 4 [p.m.], when we have someone there, you're gonna have to be shipped to Albany for a 15-minute procedure," he said. "This is absurdity."
According to Anderson, when the Albany Med affiliation began, staff had high hopes that the company would make much-needed improvements to the hospital’s physical plant, and upgrade outdated X-Ray equipment – which, he added, would’ve also increased reimbursement rates.
Some of those changes happened. But overall, he said, the facilities have deteriorated. Case in point: the cafeteria.
"We had a cafeteria that had these wonderful cooks, and they made great meals," Anderson said. "We had a salad bar. We had two or three wonderful entrees every day. People would come from town to eat at our cafeteria because it was good. And then when Albany Med took us over, they got rid of it. They scaled everything back. We have one hot meal a day, and everything else comes plastic wrapped."
In a statement, an Albany Med spokesman said “Columbia Memorial has run unsustainable, multi-million dollar annual operating deficits. The hospital is seeking to correct that problem.” For Anderson, those rationalizations ring hollow.
"These are supposed to be nonprofit institutions, you know?" he said. "And if we're paying our executives, the salaries that we're paying them, there's money somewhere."
Albany Med is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. In 2024, the Columbia Memorial CEO earned over $2 million in compensation.
Meanwhile, according to Anderson, Columbia Memorial staff are bracing for layoffs. Anderson said critical access hospitals – the kind Columbia Memorial is looking to become – average about 400 employees. Columbia Memorial currently has about 1,500.
"Are they telling us that we're going from 100 beds to 25 with no loss of jobs?" Anderson said. "What our CEO said in her letter to us was, 'we currently have no plans for layoffs.' It's not the same as saying there won't eventually be layoffs."
In their emailed statement, Albany Med said, “There will be no layoffs. Columbia Memorial expects to add local jobs to support expanded surgical and behavioral health services.”
Anderson said that may be true, but there’s no guarantee that those jobs will be at Columbia Memorial. He worries staff will be re-assigned to one of Albany Med’s 37 outpatient facilities. And that if they are, they’ll end up working somewhere that doesn’t have union representation.
"We have a lot of generational employees there ... it's a community hospital," Anderson said. "It is not just a place where people come to climb a career ladder. They come to that hospital not because we have the greatest facility, not because we have the most advanced technology. They come there because they live in that community. They want to serve the community, and they want to serve their neighbors and their friends. I see my patients at the grocery store. I see them at the farmers market. I see them at the post office. They're not just a number to me. And I feel I think a lot of people who work at the hospital feel that way."
