After announcing earlier this year intentions to close emergency and acute care at Providence Mission Hospital, Laguna Beach, officials with the healthcare network have agreed to evaluate a smaller hospital to keep services local in the city.
“Agreeing to a study is a significant step forward,” said Councilmember Bob Whalen, who, with Councilmember Alex Rounaghi, heads up the city’s 16-member hospital task force established in March to come up with a hospital action plan in response to the announcement that the hospital would close in 2030 and become an outpatient facility.
The state is requiring seismic retrofitting to the buildings on the 22-acre property in South Laguna by 2030. Hospital officials have said keeping the current facility afloat would be too costly.
Up to now, Seth Teigen, Providence Mission’s CEO, has said that the new vision for the hospital is to replace the emergency department with a new outpatient-focused healthcare center, rather than retrofit the existing hospital buildings.
An upgraded urgent care facility would be part of that outpatient facility, Teigen has said. But such a facility can’t take 9-1-1 patients, and under current California law, an ER can’t exist without being attached to an acute-care hospital. Both city and hospital officials have also agreed to pursue state legislation for a standalone ER.
“As this process unfolds, part of the evaluation will be what the standalone emergency room offers in terms of level of service compared to a ‘micro-hospital,’” Whalen said. “I think it’s very possible that the community concludes, ‘No, we really want a hospital, not a standalone ER.’ That could be a primary pathway and the standalone ER is second.”
A “micro-hospital” could include an emergency room, a few required services such as diagnostics, food service and a pharmacy.
“The fact we’ll have both alternatives analyzed is important,” Whalen said. “If they hadn’t agreed to that and all the eggs were in the standalone ER basket, that’s not a good outcome and leaves the community with no ambulance delivery services.”
The recent agreement doesn’t bind Providence Mission to building the micro-hospital, Whalen added, but commits them to analyzing it, discussing it with the city, and testing its feasibility.
The council later this month is also expected to consider hiring a consulting team to evaluate options for acute care in the city.
The decision to get firsthand knowledge from experts who understand health needs, the site’s geology, and the legalities of closing a hospital is critical, Whalen said. How much this could cost the city is hard to speculate because the work, he said, would be “broad-ranging.”
In addition to the city’s plans to become more familiar with what can be done with the hospital site, Whalen said the city’s lobbying firm is continuing its dialogue with hospital officials about pursuing possible state legislation for a standalone ER. Providence Mission officials are on board with pursuing joint legislative efforts.
“This is currently not allowed by California law and was recently vetoed by Gov. (Gavin) Newsom,” Whalen said. “I don’t know if it’s fruitful or not, but we did have a good conversation.”
The two council members and the hospital task force began focusing on the future of emergency room services after Teigen announced in January that the healthcare system no longer planned to operate an acute trauma hospital with an ER in Laguna Beach.
The facility on the 20-plus-acre campus in South Laguna would need to complete a $300 million retrofit to its nearly 70-year-old tower by 2030 to comply with California’s seismic safety mandates. And, Providence would need to pay another $50 million to replace the facility’s original plumbing and electrical systems.
Providence officials participated in a public task force meeting on Aug. 20 at City Hall to answer community questions. They also discussed data on how many and what type of patients are being seen.
The hospital is treating an average of 17,000 patients a year.
Of those, 84% are seen and discharged without requiring hospitalization; 73% of those who arrived didn’t come by ambulance; and 2.5% were taken to the hospital’s Mission Viejo campus for a higher level of care, according to hospital officials. Providence has pointed to these trends as a reason for its new model focused on outpatient care.
And patients with acute issues such as severe trauma, a heart attack, or stroke are typically not taken to Laguna Beach; instead, they go to Mission Hospital in Laguna Beach or Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, which are considered specialty centers that can receive patients with those conditions. Burn victims are taken to OC Global or UCI Health-Orange. Saddleback Hospital and Hoag Irvine are also specialty centers.
While Mission Laguna Beach is not a specialty center, Whalen said patients who come in experiencing these issues can get help, even though the hospital doesn’t have the county designation.
Trish Sweeney, who suffered a heart condition in 2025 and says an ER doctor in Laguna Beach saved her life, said she left the meeting disappointed because hospital officials didn’t seem willing to budge from their plan to remove acute care. (The community meeting was before this week’s joint statement was released about a study of a smaller hospital.)
“They’re not addressing the adverse public health effect,” she said. “I was in that situation when I suffered a sudden cardiac emergency during the summer. Providence says that of the 17,275 people who went to the ER last year. Of those, they said, over 14,000 could have gotten help at an Urgent Care. But what’s unsaid is that 3,000 people used that emergency room and received life-saving care only an ER can provide. And I was one of those people.”
Sweeney has been actively pushing the community to support keeping emergency services in Laguna Beach through a Change.org petition, which was launched four months ago and had 7,355 signatures as of Thursday.
Among Sweeney’s concerns about an ER closure are the long commute times to other regional hospitals. The community’s hospital was built in 1959 after wounded Laguna Beach Police Officer Gordon French died in 1953 during transport to Hoag Hospital.
“There are only three ways out of town,” Sweeney said of the 4,000 ambulance transports the hospital sees each year. “So the drive times are significant. It can be up to an hour at peak drive times to get to another hospital.”
Sweeney also said that Orange County EMS data show ambulance transports are already reaching the top of “that golden hour,” the first 60 minutes after a critical injury or illness.
“By the time they get up the hills, get through traffic and get them to another emergency room, there’s a likelihood there’s going to be adverse effects,” she said.
Rounaghi said that getting a smaller hospital is likely the only way the city can keep an emergency room.
“That’s why the city has pushed for this and why a study matters,” he said. “It’s not a commitment, and we’re not treating it like one. While Providence does its analysis, we’ll keep using every tool to protect emergency care here.”