About two dozen nurses and doctors rallied outside Watsonville Community Hospital Monday, calling on hospital administrators to reopen the neonatal intensive care unit that has been closed since July 10.
The informational picket organized by the California Nurses Association focused on the hospital’s decision to temporarily close the NICU because of staffing shortages. Nurses say the closure forces newborns who could otherwise receive care locally to be transferred elsewhere, potentially separating them from their mothers and creating hardships for families.
Hospital Interim CEO Tim Moran said the closure was necessary because the hospital faced the possibility of falling below state-mandated nurse staffing requirements. He said the NICU will reopen when the hospital has enough staff to safely operate both it and the labor and delivery department.
“The NICU has been closed until we can safely reopen the full service with labor and delivery and the NICU,” Moran said. “And it will remain closed until we can safely do so.”
But nurses at Monday’s rally said the staffing shortage did not develop suddenly, and blamed hospital management for failing to replace departing nurses and bring in temporary nurses quickly enough.
Roseann Farris, an intensive care unit nurse who has worked at Watsonville Community Hospital for 30 years, said employees want hospital management to stabilize staffing and reopen the NICU.
“We are drawing a red line and saying that we are resolute in keeping our service lines open and keeping our hospital open,” she said.
Farris said the issue is particularly important given the community’s efforts to save the hospital after its former owner filed for bankruptcy. The Pajaro Valley Health Care District purchased the hospital in 2022, and voters in 2024 approved Measure N, a $116 million bond intended to help the district purchase the hospital property and make improvements.
“As stakeholders, you’ve seen over and over how we’ve saved this hospital,” Farris said. “We also need to make sure that there’s a clear understanding that those service lines are there for our community.”
Farris said babies who require NICU services are currently transferred to other hospitals, depending on where beds are available. That can leave a newborn receiving care outside the area while the mother remains in Watsonville.
“What happens here affects the whole county,” she said.
NICU charge nurse Silvia Perez said Watsonville operates a Level II unit capable of caring for babies born at more than 32 weeks gestation, including newborns with respiratory problems, difficulty transitioning after birth and other conditions.
Perez described a recent case in which a baby born at about 35 weeks had difficulty feeding. Under normal circumstances, she said, the baby could have been admitted to Watsonville’s NICU and fed through a nasogastric tube.
Because the NICU was closed, the baby was eventually transferred to Stanford Children’s Hospital. Five days later, Perez said, a Stanford case manager called Watsonville asking whether the hospital could take the baby back because the child was stable and the family was having difficulty traveling to Stanford.
Watsonville could not accept the baby because its NICU remained closed.
“I’ve seen it over the years—we have low-resource families that can’t just drive up to Lucile Packard or even down the road when they have a sick baby,” Perez said. “Just keeping babies local when they can get their care here is really important for this community.”
Perez said the hospital has reassigned her to the postpartum unit during the closure.
She also disputed the idea that the staffing problem emerged unexpectedly.
“This crisis didn’t happen just in July,” Perez said. “This has slowly been happening where they’ve not been replacing people that leave or they’ve not been contracting the travelers in a timely fashion.”
Moran rejected that characterization.
“I disagree with that 100%,” he said. “We had a staffing shortage.”
Moran said a scheduling problem emerged that could have left the hospital out of compliance with state-mandated staffing ratios.
“That’s what led to having to close the NICU,” he said. “And that’s what it’s all about right now—is making sure that we have the labor and delivery staff and the NICU staff that can safely deliver care and meet the state mandates.”
Moran said the closure is not intended to be permanent.
“It’s not my intent to keep the NICU closed,” he said.
Watsonville Community Hospital delivers roughly 700-750 babies annually, or about two per day, Moran said. He characterized the number requiring NICU care as small and said higher-risk mothers and seriously ill newborns already are transferred to hospitals that can provide a higher level of care.
Since January, he said, about 16 patients had been transferred to other hospitals as of mid-August.
Moran said alternatives include Natividad, Dominican and Sutter hospitals, and that he has spoken with those facilities.
“I’ve not had any concern expressed to me about the inability to be able to handle patients that might come from here to them,” he said.
California Nurses Association labor representative Teresa Mack said nurses were particularly troubled that the union and community were not notified before the closure.
Farris similarly said management typically contacts the union before closing a department, but that did not happen this time. Nurses initially waited to give administrators time to address staffing, she said, before deciding to publicly protest.
“I’ve been a nurse here for 30 years, been through a bankruptcy, I’ve been through a pandemic, I’ve been through all of that and we never closed any departments,” Farris said. “Today we’re asking for the same.”
Moran also said the labor and delivery/NICU department recently experienced a Covid-19 outbreak involving approximately nine nurses. The outbreak occurred after the NICU closure and was not a factor in the decision, he said.
The hospital reported the outbreak to county health officials and instituted mandatory masking and other precautions, Moran said. He said he reviews staffing in the department daily.
“I look at our staffing for that unit every day with our nursing director,” he said, “with an eye toward when we can safely open.”
