San Diego

The San Diego City Council voted Monday to relinquish its interest in San Diego Physicians & Surgeons Hospital, eliminating the last obstacle to a sale of the ailing Southeast San Diego facility.

Nationwide Medical Systems of Perris, Calif., has agreed to buy the loss-plagued hospital from its current operator, National Medical Enterprises, for $6.5 million. The firm will rename the hospital, which has lost about $20 million since NME took it over in 1982, as Christian Hospital of San Diego.

In recent years, NME repeatedly threatened to close the hospital’s emergency room, the major source of its financial losses and the impoverished area’s only acute-care emergency facility.

With Monday’s vote, the council gave up its ownership interest in the hospital, established under the terms of bonds used to finance the 187-bed facility’s construction in 1972.