Sale proposal of Buttonwood Hospital now provides for staff, patients

After a public uproar over the proposed sale of Buttonwood Hospital, the Burlington County freeholder board now says potential buyers will be required to operate the facility as a nursing home for at least 10 years and retain current long-term patients.

An auction of the Pemberton hospital is scheduled for March 1 in the freeholder conference room in Mount Holly. The 100-year-old hospital, which has 170 nursing-home beds and 30 psychiatric beds, serves mostly indigent patients.

The freeholders also decided that the buyer must keep the psychiatric beds for a decade or place the patients at another location in Burlington County during that time period.

Nearly 400 health-care advocates, employees, and residents attended a hearing Jan. 31 and expressed concerns about what would happen to the patients and staff if the hospital were sold.

Freeholders spokesman Ralph Shrom said the board took another look this week at its auction plans and decided to request bids that included provisions to retain the hospital's 319 employees and to recognize their union, Communication Workers of America Local 1036. Those bids then will be compared with offers in which the buyers agree to interview all employees before making decisions about the staff.

Shrom said that Cumberland County freeholders last month sold that county's nursing home for $14 million and accepted the offer that said all employees would be retained. That bid, he said, was about $100,000 more than the offer that had no such provision.

The Burlington County freeholders say they want to sell Buttonwood because it has been operating at a deficit for a decade and is expected to lose $4.5 million this year.

The freeholders also set the minimum bid at $15 million.

Contact staff writer Jan Hefler

at 856-779-3224, jhefler@phillynews. com, or @JanHefler at Twitter. Read her blog at www.philly.com/BurlcoBuzz.