On Wednesday evening, Memorial Medical Center’s conference room was filled with dozens of community members during a public board meeting with the hospital’s executive leadership team.
The meeting was held amid a New Mexico Department of Justice investigation into MMC, which includes allegations of refusing to treat cancer patients, as well as an ongoing lease dispute between the medical center, the City of Las Cruces, and Doña Ana County.
Community members were given time to speak directly to the board, with many raising concerns about public trust, transparency issues, and even workplace violence within the hospital.
Dennis Knox took over as Memorial Medical’s interim CEO after John Harris’s retirement just weeks after the New Mexico Department of Justice announced their investigation into the hospital. While Knox wouldn’t speak in-depth about the ongoing legal disputes, he did express optimism regarding the lease dispute.
“We have special working sessions that I’ve called with the city, the county, and the hospital to look into the asset purchase agreement. It’s a 40-year agreement and we’re in year 21 of the 40-year agreement. So, we’re trying to bring it current and contemporize it, and make sure that our reporting obligations meet the standards of 2024 and not 2004,” Knox said. “We are working collaboratively with the AG’s office, and I aspiringly want this to end soon. And I think we can move forward afterward.”
Additionally, Knox said that the public meetings are important for building partnerships between the medical center and the community it serves.
“We can always be better. We want to better serve the community. We want to meet the needs of the community. And we can only do that if we have the transparency to have the public be able to come to us with their needs and wants.”
One of the community members at the meeting was Yolanda Diaz, founder of CARE Las Cruces, a nonprofit that assists cancer patients with non-medical expenses and basic living needs. Diaz said she’s been calling for an investigation into MMC since 2021 regarding the hospital’s billing practices and allegedly turning away cancer patients, and said that she was hoping for more solutions to be presented by the hospital’s board.
“I wanted to see what they were going to say in the board meeting. I knew that they were going to have a presentation. What exactly was going to be in there? Were they going to be offering solutions to the issues that I had reported? I didn’t see that here today. But I sure hope, like I’ve said many times, all the stakeholders have to come back to the table, and they truly need to have a written policy, a written guideline that really addresses these issues that allows for action to be taken.”
Diaz said that amid all the legal disputes and transparency issues, her hope is that members of the community will be able to get treatment when they need it, without having to worry about being turned away.
“What the administration did to allow for these services to not be accessed, and actually write it into policy – that I find seriously unforgivable, because I know that this is almost 10 years of that,” Diaz said. “I [want] to see that corrected, whatever it takes. And at the end of the day, you’re going to have to put some money into this, and who’s going to pay for it?”
As MMC continues community dialogue and solving its legal disputes, community members are watching closely, hoping that actions taken will result in a healthier medical landscape for citizens and medical providers alike.
