[K]leen Inc. abruptly closed its plant in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, on Friday, leaving 100 people out of work and more than a dozen hospitals in Vermont and New Hampshire scrambling to find clean linens.
Hospital officials said they were informed Kleen, which is one of only a handful of linen providers in the region, was closing less than two weeks ago. Some hospitals are getting linens from as far away as New York and Canada now, while others are being forced to do thousands of pounds of laundry themselves.
Copley Hospital in Morrisville is renting a mobile laundry trailer and paying employees and per diem staff to wash 6,000 pounds of laundry a week themselves starting on Monday.
Copley Hospital Director of Development Dean Mudgett said Copley reached out to all of the vendors in the region.
“Unfortunately for us, all of those vendors are currently at capacity and they cannot accommodate additional clients,” said Mudgett.
Kleen has long provided washed patient and surgical gowns, bedsheets, towels, washcloths and hospital coats — which is crucial to prevent disease — to about 20 hospitals in Vermont and New Hampshire, including Springfield Hospital, Central Vermont Medical Center, Copley, Gifford Medical Center, Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Rutland Regional Medical Center.
Kleen co-owner Ned Hazard said the company was trying to secure finance options before it closed.
“We exhausted those efforts right before we made the public announcement,” Hazard said.
Kleen, which dates back to 1897, has seen financial difficulty in recent years. The company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2016 and has recently closed dry cleaning and laundromat locations in Lebanon and Claremont, New Hampshire.
Kleen informed hospital officials it was having financial difficulty this past winter, but several hospital officials said they were shocked the business was closing. Some learned about the closure from other hospitals.
“The biggest issue our organizations are facing is the time,” said Vermont Hospital Association Finance and Operations Senior Vice President Michael Del Trecco. “It was a little bit of a mad scramble to find a replacement.”
Rutland Regional Director of Support Services Brian Olsen said he heard the Kleen plant was closing 10 days before it shut down.
“I was surprised — not only by the announcement to close but the 10-day notice — especially when you have an entire region that you’re servicing,” he said. “They had a monopoly.”
Olsen said Vermont and New Hampshire hospitals met in conference calls last week to find a collaborative solution. Hospital administrators even considered operating the Kleen plant themselves, but Olsen said that option wasn’t economically viable.
“The decision was made — everybody’s got to find their own linen vendor,” he said.
Earl Ralph, the president of Medique Medical Supplies, a linen service in Montreal, said he’s been inundated with calls from Vermont hospitals.
“It was quite a shocking situation,” said Ralph. “We can only take on so much volume in a short period of time. We’re helping the Vermont market as best we can in a tough situation.”
Medique works with hospitals in Canada, Vermont, New Hampshire and New York, and has worked with UVM Medical Center for 20 years.
Ralph saw Kleen’s closure as a management issue.
“You have inexperienced people running a plant and it’s unfortunate,” he said. “Their plant is outdated and needed huge investments.”
Ralph said Medique has temporarily taken on Central Vermont, which is part of the UVM Health Network, but the company can’t accommodate other Vermont hospitals at the time.
Rutland Regional secured Century Linen & Uniform in Albany, New York, as a new provider, while Springfield Hospital, which uses 5,000 pounds of laundry a week, is using ImageFIRST Healthcare Laundry Specialists in New Hampshire.
“It took us by complete surprise, but we really didn’t have time to dwell on it,” said Springfield Hospital Marketing and Development Chief Anna Smith.
Hospital officials say the new providers are also more costly than Kleen.
Rutland Regional, which uses 1.2 million pounds of laundry a year, is seeing a 5-cent rate increase per pound with the new provider, up from Kleen’s rate of about 40 cents per pound, Olsen said.
Central Vermont, which also paid Kleen about 40 cents per pound, will pay Medique 62 cents per pound of laundry going forward, according to an employee who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak for the organization.
“It’s a real financial hit,” the employee said.
Kleen employees delivered final linens to hospitals on Friday. Hazard said the company has held onsite job fairs with area employers to help the company’s 110 employees find other jobs. Hazard also said he spoke with all of Kleen’s customers.
“I think everyone was able to find an alternative,” he said.
