HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley, the parent company that runs Kingston Hospital, Benedictine Hospital, Margaretville Hospital and the Mountainside and Woodland Pond residential care centers, is considering closing one of its two Kingston hospital campuses.
The news was announced in a press release this afternoon. The release did not say which campus HealthAlliance may close.
Until a few years ago, Kingston and Benedictine operated as separate entities -- one a secular hospital, the other a Catholic hospital run by the Benedictine Sisters. The two hospitals were consolidated under the management of HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley in 2009.
The merger, which took several years to pull off, was recommended in a 2006 report by a state commission chaired by Stephen Berger. If the hospitals could not agree to be joined under a single authority, the Berger commission wrote in 2006, the Commissioner of Health should shut one of them down.
The Kingston-Benedictine merger, which was made possible by the creation of a separate entity that could perform reproductive procedures like abortion, sterilization and contraception, was a rare example of a merger that allowed both the Catholic and non-Catholic facility to stay open:
There were six recommendations by the Berger Commission that involved Catholic and non-Catholic partnerships, HAHV was the only one successful in keeping both hospitals open.
Below: HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley's press release announcing the possible closure of a campus.
