Catalina Islands only hospital fights for its future amid dire financial outlook

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Set us as preferred The Saturday morning calm at Catalina Island Health’s two-bed emergency room was broken just before noon, when two tourists with arm injuries burst in within minutes of one another.Praveen Biln, the registered nurse on duty in the ER, kicked into gear checking vital signs on the first arrival, a woman in her 50s who broke a bone in her elbow when she fell while roller skating at the Catalina Casino.Minutes later, 8-year-old Carter Olsen hobbled in with his worried mother after hurting his arm in a fall.An X-ray ultimately revealed it wasn’t fractured.“Can I ask you a silly question: Did you hit your head? Can you turn your neck?” Biln asked him to be sure he wasn’t hurt anywhere else.

Carter, of Newport Beach, told the nurse that he had not, and that he could.“Awesome,” Biln told him.

“You’re doing so good.”As the only full-time medical provider on the island, Catalina Island Health is a vital resource for approximately 4,000 residents and 1 million annual visitors.But Tim Kielpinski, the hospital’s CEO, says it was “in dire straits” and on the brink of having to shut its doors last year before it received an emergency multimillion-dollar bailout from the county.“We just had six days of cash on hand in June of 2025,” he said Saturday evening at a fundraiser for the hospital.

“Six days,” he added, “before we would have faced impossible decisions.”Its financial picture has improved somewhat since that nadir, but Catalina Island Health remains one of several hospitals across Los Angeles County that are struggling to stay open in the face of strong financial headwinds.Inflation has soared since the COVID-19 pandemic, government reimbursement for Medi-Cal patients and the uninsured often doesn’t cover costs, and providers say they frequently have difficulties obtaining ...