‘People keep dying.’ Two Madera patients died in the last month, one en route to Fresno

At least two Madera patients with heart problems died within the last month, one en route to Fresno and the other waiting for an ambulance at a Madera nursing home, a local doctor told The Bee on Friday.

Since Madera Community Hospital shuttered its doors in January, patients have been forced to travel to Fresno for medical services, the closest city with acute health care hospitals for adults.

Dr. Mohammad Ashraf, who is a specialist in cardiovascular disease, said both of the death cases involved his patients. He was not able to share identifiable information about the patients or detailed information due to privacy laws.

One of the patients, a woman, became sick and was being transported to Saint Agnes Medical Center when she died. Given her condition, Ashraf said, doctors were not able to revive her at Saint Agnes’ emergency room.

“She could have been saved if she could have come here (a hospital in Madera),” he told The Bee during an interview. “God knows only who’s going to live and who’s going to die. I’m not here to say that, but there’s a good chance that she would be alive today.”

The second patient, Ashraf said, was an older patient who had been at Saint Agnes for a couple of weeks, and then returned to a nursing home in Madera, but became sick again.

“He died when the ambulance was en route” to the nursing home, Ashraf said. “I’m not sure whether they would have saved that patient or not, but possibly.”

Ashraf said he believes the situation will only become bleaker.

“It’s going to definitely get worse, there’s no question about that,” he said, adding that doctors are leaving Madera since the hospital closed.

The government at the state, county or city level needs to act, he said.

“If not, people will die and die,” he said. “There has to be an acute care hospital over here. Whether this is Saint Agnes’ fault, whether it’s the attorney general’s fault... we need to forget the fault, and we need to find ways to open the hospital.”

After more than a year of negotiations, Trinity Health, the operator of Saint Agnes, in late December called off the purchase of the Madera hospital, which had been financially “distressed.” At the time, Trinity Health said given complex circumstances and additional conditions imposed by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, it couldn’t move forward with an affiliation agreement.

In announcing the closure, the Madera hospital said it planned to file for bankruptcy on Jan. 3, but it hasn’t done so. Today, the hospital continues to employ a skeleton staff including its chief executive officer, who said finding a path to reopening is still a possibility.

Ashraf said he attended a community forum on Thursday night, where officials said not much could be done now to reopen the hospital.

“How is it possible that we cannot do anything?” he asked. “There’s no way we can let this continue to happen and people keep dying here. This is California, this is the United States, we need to really be proactive in this. We cannot just give up and lose hope.”

Lack of services, doctors leaving

At the moment, he said, there is no OBGYN in the city of Madera, no way to get patients’ labs done after 5 p.m. and no X-rays available on weekends. There’s also no CT-scan available in Madera, he said.

“It’s devastating,” he said. “We have patients who literally have no access to medical care at this time.”

Furthermore, he said, some patients are hesitant to travel to Fresno for medical services, given the distance, and because they will have to see different doctors.

Some of his patients, he said, don’t even have transportation to Fresno. Ashraf has lived in Madera for 42 years, and he’s seen the need for medical health care services increase over the years.

“The hospital has to reopen,” he said.