For over a year Dr. Robert Griffin kept saying that Advocate Health Care was driving Ravenswood Hospital toward extinction. All that time Advocate kept saying that Griffin was wrong, that it was committed to maintaining the hospital.
Yet by the mid-90s Ravenswood was struggling, a victim of local and national trends. The surrounding community was gentrifying, and the new residents–with fewer allegiances to local institutions–apparently didn’t mind driving across town for medical services. Ravenswood’s reputation suffered a major blow in 1998 after emergency-room staff allowed a boy who’d been shot by gangbangers to bleed to death outside the hospital. HMOs also were limiting hospital stays in order to cut expenses, and the state and federal governments had cut back on medicare and medicaid payments.
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The courtly and soft-spoken Griffin seems an unlikely activist. But over the last few years he’s been tenacious, firing off memos to residents and doctors, accusing Advocate of plotting to close down Ravenswood even as the company insisted it was doing everything possible to keep it open. “I suspect that Advocate thought that most of Ravenswood’s patients would follow their doctors to Masonic,” he says. “I don’t think they had any intention of keeping Ravenswood open. The things they did are unconscionable. They closed the emergency room to ambulance service. Are you telling me this community doesn’t need an emergency room? What happens when some of these other hospitals have to turn ambulances away?”
Elizondo says Kansfield’s right when she claims Advocate did everything it could to save Ravenswood. “It’s sad to see that Ravenswood is closing its doors,” he says. “But I’ve seen enough in Chicago with medical economics to recognize that things just need to be done sometimes. There was no alternative.” He adds that Griffin is misguided: “It’s admirable that he has this mission, but I think that from my perspective he should move on and try to see how he can better utilize his resources to help the community in other ways. Perhaps his energies could be targeted on projects that are doable.”
He stopped at a room on the fifth floor that was deserted except for the folded-up metal frame of a bed. Someone had left a textbook, Human Sexuality: A Nursing Perspective, on the floor. “I don’t buy any of their excuses,” he said. “They say medicare and medicaid have been cut. Well, what did they do to stop that? Can you imagine what a force for good Advocate could be if they used their money and political connections to point out all the defects in our system? If you keep working within a defective system, everyone loses, particularly the patient. The things they list as reasons for their demise are what they should be fighting, not going along with.”
