It’s been a week since St. Luke’s Hospital in Des Peres closed its doors for good and laid off more than 300 people.
Approximately half of the employees who lost their jobs at the hospital were able to find work at other St. Luke’s locations, a spokeswoman said in an email. The nonprofit Episcopal health system operates a 493-bed hospital in Chesterfield and several outpatient clinics throughout the region.
According to the Missouri Department of Workforce Development, 336 people lost their jobs when the location in the affluent west St. Louis County suburb closed. Around two-thirds of those workers were full-time employees.
“We recognize the significant legacy of Des Peres Hospital and the commitment of its extraordinary caregivers who have served generations of families with compassion and professionalism,” St. Luke’s spokeswoman Megan Donovan said in an email.
Officials said the hospital did not have enough patients to stay open. The health system closed the location less than eight years after it bought the Dougherty Ferry Road campus in 2018.
Donovan said the company is still exploring plans for the future of the hospital campus on Dougherty Ferry Road.
Experts have said hospitals are at risk of financial squeezes as changes to Medicaid kick in over the next few years. Fewer patients using Medicaid could mean health systems could be forced to provide more uncompensated or charity care.
While advocates and news reports frequently focus on the plight of rural hospitals that are forced to limit services or close completely, around 60% of all hospital closures from 2010 to 2021 were in metropolitan areas, an analysis of hospital survey data from researchers at Emory University reported.
Urban hospitals that close are more likely to be smaller, with fewer than 200 beds, and for-profit, instead of nonprofit, researchers found.
St. Luke’s officials, when announcing the closure in June, said, “Despite the dedication and hard work of our team members, the hospital has faced persistently low utilization and increasing financial pressures.”
The last hospitals to close in the St. Louis region were the troubled South City Hospital in Dutchtown, which had been beset by bankruptcy and changing ownership, and Homer G. Phillips Memorial Hospital, a three-bed facility on north Jefferson Avenue that had been open for less than a year.
