Mayo closing six clinics, moving some surgeries out of Albert Lea hospital

Mayo Clinic is closing six small-town medical clinics across southeastern Minnesota and relocating elective outpatient surgeries from Albert Lea to Austin and Waseca.

The Rochester-based health system cited declining staffing and patient volumes for the closures it announced Monday evening, and it’s notifying patients of options to shift care to other Mayo facilities or competing clinics.

Closures are planned by Dec. 10 for the Northridge clinic in North Mankato as well as clinics in Belle Plaine, Caledonia, Montgomery, St. Peter and Wells. Some patients already had appointments scheduled in early December and the health system opted not to disrupt them.

A couple of the clinics had inconsistent hours because they were down to only one or two clinicians staffing them, said Dr. Karthik Ghosh, vice president of Mayo Clinic Health System in Minnesota, a network of 16 hospitals and more than 40 clinics statewide.

“If (the clinicians) are gone, the system shuts down,” she said. “That’s not how it’s supposed to be. We need reliable care across our sites.”

Patients will need to travel 10 to 20 minutes farther to access the next closest Mayo facilities, Ghosh said. Many patients already were visiting multiple Mayo facilities. Some of the clinics being closed had no lab or imaging capacity that patients frequently needed to seek elsewhere.

The change in Albert Lea upset a community group that has criticized Mayo ever since it consolidated its Austin and Albert Lea hospitals in 2013. Inpatient elective surgeries already had been moved to Austin, but outpatient procedures in areas such as ophthalmology, orthopedics, endoscopy and gynecology still took place locally.

“Now, eight years later, they’ve pulled that, too,” she said.

Ghosh said the hospital campus in Albert Lea remains important and that patients will still receive preoperative and postoperative care locally. Nonelective surgeries will still occur in Albert Lea, where Mayo is in the process of upgrading its emergency department.

Surgeries tend to be safer when performed in hospitals with higher volumes and more practice, Ghosh said. “You can actually have less errors. It really is about a quality issue.”

While many rural Minnesota health systems are struggling financially, Mayo posted an annual record of $1.3 billion in operating income in 2024. The health system is in the middle of its $5.6 billion Destination Medical Center plan to cement Rochester as a global hub of health care.

Ghosh said the health system at a primary care level needs to invest in alternatives such as online care that can be more accessible for patients than struggling local clinics. Some of the clinic buildings being closed had upkeep issues; the Wells clinic has a mold problem, she noted.