Сиэтл аймағындағы Swedish Health Services желісі

the Seattle area hospital network
Health system in the Seattle area

Swedish Health Services, formerly Swedish Medical Center, is the largest nonprofit health provider in the Seattle metropolitan area. It operates five hospital campuses (in the Seattle neighborhoods of First Hill, Cherry Hill and Ballard, and the cities of Edmonds and Issaquah), ambulatory care centers in the cities of Redmond and Mill Creek, and Swedish Medical Group, a network of more than 100 primary care and specialty clinics. Founded as a nonprofit hospital in First Hill, Seattle in 1910, the then named Swedish Hospital was formed by 11 Swedish Americans who wanted to offer care that incorporates the medical advances seen in other parts of the country. As of 2021, it employs more than 3,800 physicians and handles more than two million outpatient visits per year. The hospital network has been owned by the Catholic healthcare system Providence Health & Services since 2012. The board of trustees for Swedish Hospital were historically of Swedish descent until the election of two non Swedish American doctors in 1968. Swedish originally started with its First Hill campus, but began to expand its network by merging with Seattle General Hospital (founded 1895) and the Doctors Hospital (founded 1944) in May 1978. Swedish then expanded outside First Hill when it purchased Ballard Community Hospital in the Seattle district of Ballard (founded 1928) on July 1, 1992. After a decade, Swedish began expanding outside Seattle and King County with its lease of Stevens Hospital (founded January 26, 1964) Edmonds on September 1, 2010, and the opening of a brand new campus in Issaquah in July, 2011. In 2009, Swedish partnered with The Polyclinic to implement electronic health records, and in 2012, it became a division of Providence Health & Services. In 2014, Swedish formed new partnerships with Group Health Cooperative and Pacific Medical Centers.

Swedish Health Services is owned by the Catholic healthcare system Providence Health & Services. In 2012, Swedish and Providence announced that the two hospital systems would form an alliance, with both organizations citing their own staffing challenges caused by budget shortfalls as the reason. Swedish emphasized that it would remain a nonreligious organization, although the formerly independent Swedish would become a division of Providence. Around the same time of the merger announcement, Swedish also stopped performing elective abortions “out of respect for the affiliation,” and offered to instead underwrite a Planned Parenthood center adjacent to its Seattle hospital. During the 2022 abortion protests, Swedish issued a statement clarifying that it is not bound by the Conference of Catholic Bishops’s Ethical and Religious Directives and would continue to offer birth control. It also required workers infected with coronavirus to exhaust sick and vacation time before granting them 80 hours of emergency time off. Swedish Medical Center is one of only seven hospitals in Washington that can perform extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and accepted patients with extreme cases of COVID 19 during the pandemic. The hospital is performing clinical trials of Tocilizumab to counter the effects of a cytokine storm, an extreme immune reaction that occurs in the most extreme cases of COVID 19.