(Radio Iowa) -A northwest Iowa hospital will close in September. O’Brien County Economic Development director Kianna Johnson says the closure of MercyOne Medical Center in Primghar is devastating news.  “You hate to lose a business like that. They employ 45 people between the clinics and the hospital and those are jobs we don’t want to lose,” Johnson says. “…We don’t want to lose those services for the people of O’Brien County.”

A MercyOne clinic will remain open in Primghar, but MercyOne clinics in nearby Sutherland and Paulina will be closed. Johnson says community leaders in the county met last week. “It was a really good meeting to work through what we know and how we can move forward,” Johnson says. “We need to talk about the building in Primghar and those services, to try and keep them in the community.” Johnson says she’s reached out to the South Dakota based system that operates facilities in northwest Iowa in hopes Sanford Health might take over the hospital in Primghar.

Sanford operates over 380 facilities in seven states. Primghar has had a hospital since 1914. In 2000, Mercy Hospital in Sioux City acquired the Primghar hospital and it was rebranded as a MercyOne facility in early 2019. The last hospital to close in Iowa was in Keokuk — in October of 2022. A Michigan-based company bought the hospital in 2023 and plans to open it later this year as a rural emergency hospital. Patients will be stabilized at the facility in Keokuk, then transferred elsewhere.