From struggling to flourishing, Mee Memorial Hospital is a pandemic success story

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic showed up at Mee Memorial Hospital’s doorstep, the small, rural hospital in King City was facing immense challenges. Administrators cut 13 percent of the hospital’s workforce in July 2019, due to cuts in Medicare, Medi-Cal and private insurance reimbursements. When shelter-in-place began in March 2020, newly minted CEO Rena Salamacha realized the only way to remain open was to cut even more.

Salamacha rightly predicted that fearful patients weren’t going to come to the nonprofit hospital and its clinics in King City and Greenfield unless the situation was dire. Clinic visits slowed to a trickle. “We responded quickly and very early. We had to make a lot of difficult decisions,” she says. She cut another 18 percent of the workforce in April 2020 and the management team took the equivalent of a 10-percent pay cut. “Those decisions are why we are still standing and growing today.”

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