PORT ANGELES — Virginia Mason clinic doctors will meet with Olympic Medical Center administrators at 7 a.m. Monday at the clinic to air their positions on the Eight Street location’s April 30 closing.
Five hours later, medical center commissioners will convene privately to discuss real estate issues and personnel matters that comprise parts of the crisis.
The real estate issue is likely to be Olympic Medical Center’s purchase of the Klahhane Women’s Clinic building, 923 Georgiana St., from Virginia Mason Medical Center of Seattle.
The medical center is expected to pay about $775,000 for the building and equipment. The real estate alone is valued at more than $520,000 by the Clallam County Assessor’s Office.
Buying the building is one of Olympic Medical Center’s first steps toward providing primary care to 12,700 patients — 6,800 of them on Medicare — served by Virginia Mason’s family doctors.
Six or more health care providers would staff the Klahhane clinic 10 hours a day, five to six days a week. They would serve more than 100 patients daily, medical center administrators say.
Olympic Medical Center also would open a clinic in a building it already owns at 912 Caroline St.
There, five or more providers would handle more than 60 primary-care patients a day, 10 hours a day, five to six days a week.
Physicians dislike plan
The two-clinic plan that medical center CEO Mike Glenn proposed to Virginia Mason doctors Wednesday fell flat with the physicians.
“It’s felt to be a lousy plan,” Dr. Paul Pederson said Thursday night after conferring with other Virginia Mason doctors — some who learned of the strategy only when they read it Thursday morning in the PDN.
However, Hospital District Commissioner Arlene Engel said Saturday that the doctors may be rethinking their rejection of the medical center’s offer.
“I think the docs are beginning to crumble,” she said.
