At town hall, hospital pledges to improve

“You are here to make us better,” Dennis Knox said as he convened a town hall-style meeting in a crowded conference room at Memorial Medical Center.

Since August, Knox has served as the hospital’s interim CEO, arriving days after the abrupt retirement of John Harris amid controversy over a state probe that followed a NBC News report on alleged denials of service to cancer patients. The scrutiny prompted the city of Las Cruces to investigate potential breaches of the for-profit hospital’s lease of land jointly owned by the city and Doña Ana County.

The hospital’s board of trustees convened the public meeting on Nov. 16, primarily, to listen to comments and answer questions from the public, with pledges to continue outreach efforts, listen to feedback and improve its service and communications with patients – without explicitly admitting to past wrongdoing.

That admission is what Earl Nissen sought when he took the podium, recalling that Harris had denied the hospital had violated its lease, criticized the news report for “inaccuracies and misinformation” and defended the hospital’s record on indigent care. Nissen asked the board if they admitted that improper denials of service had occurred.

Memorial Medical Center interim CEO Dennis Knox listens during Q&A at the hospital’s town hall meeting on Nov. 20, 2024.

Several board members took turns to say that Memorial intended to move forward, to include community input, review the facts of what had taken place in the past, improve procedures related to patient referrals, billing and negotiating with insurance companies on out-of-network care. City Manager Ikani Taumoepeau, who sits on the hospital board as the city’s representative, said, “We look forward to the reset” as legal staff from the city and county were working closely with the hospital. In August, the city demanded documents from Memorial to examine whether any denials of care at the hospital violated its lease.

Seated on his walker, Nissen paid close attention to the answers before saying, “That’s still not answering the question.”

“We understand the frustration with that; we do,” board member Frances Scappaticci replied. “What the CEO said is the hospital’s position.”

Earlier, Knox himself had said, “We've done a comprehensive review of the (lease) and we've had very good collaborative meetings, and are developing a strong partnership with the city and the county … We’re cooperating fully with the Attorney General's office, and (as) that's still a pending legal matter, I can't get into details, but I am very hopeful that it will be resolved very soon.”

Memorial’s chief financial officer, Laura Thomas, was asked about a comment she had made to Doña Ana County commissioners in June, that prior to her arrival on the job, “there was a decision made to remove the cancer indigent care out of the lease agreement. And so that was removed out.” She said she did not recall the comment, which came during an open session archived on the county’s YouTube channel.

Yolanda Diaz, a patient advocate and cancer survivor herself who has worked to publicize the plight of cancer patients denied service, asked for time than the three minutes allotted to speakers, and was granted the space to make a 12-minute address calling for transparency and accountability over the hospital’s treatment of indigent patients. Diaz went so far as to call the alleged neglect of patients “an atrocity, a form of population control, a form of genocide.”

Besides the matters aired in the NBC News story, some of the speakers raised individual complaints about confusing billing practices and conditions they had observed at the hospital as patients or as former staff. A former nurse asked direct questions about protections for nursing staff from workplace violence and burnout. More than one speaker pressed the board to outline specific policy changes they planned to put in writing.

Knox, in turn, highlighted the hospital’s patient family advisory board, recent expansion of medical staff, the upcoming opening of an acute care center in Anthony, N.M., a new urology clinic and new treatment methods in wound care and radiology.

He noted that in 2025, Memorial Medical Center will mark its 75th anniversary.