Bill Moyer, president, St. Luke's Miners Campus, provided this statement Friday regarding the closing of the hospital-based home care services:

In order to ensure the viable future of the St. Luke's Miners Campus, and our ability to meet the patient care needs of our service area, we must be consistently vigilant about assessing community patient care needs while effectively managing resources and expenses as a not-for-profit hospital.As a result of this continuing process, we have been able to successfully meet local patient care needs and improve the overall operations at St. Luke's Miners Campus.Over the years, we have been fortunate to have a very dedicated Home Health Team providing excellent care to patients who needed services at home. St. Luke's Miners Campus is the only hospital within the St. Luke's Network that operates a hospital-based home health service.Unfortunately, the program's current volumes do not support maintaining this hospital-based service in the future.Based on this information, the difficult decision was made to close St. Luke's Miners Campus Home Health operations.We will continue to manage all existing patients until May 8, 2015. Patients requiring home health care after that date will be transferred to a Home Health organization of their choice.The majority of the current St. Luke's Miners Home Care patients will complete their treatments by May 8.The handful of long-term patients who use our services regularly will transition to another local care provider of their choice.This initiative is limited to the patients cared for by St. Luke's Miners Home Care and does not extend to other home care organizations within the St. Luke's network.The decision to close was a very difficult one for all involved, recognizing the great work that has been performed by the Home Health team over the years.There are 13 full-time employees and five part-time that will have the opportunity to transfer to any of the 25 open positions at the Miners Campus and other numerous openings within our Network.Every effort will be made to transition the current Home Health staff to alternate employment within St. Luke's Miners Campus or elsewhere in the St. Luke's University Health Network.