Within our Walls: November 21, 2022

Changes in health care are a fact of life. Nowhere is this felt more than in rural facilities. Challenges that all health care systems face are magnified in small community hospitals and clinics.

Staff shortages, lack of resources, the ongoing need to meet changing technological advances, and competition with larger facilities are always looming over smaller markets. CHI has released articles in the past months detailing individual providers and their areas of interest in medicine.

This article focuses on our medical staff as a whole and highlights the strengths of Carrington Health Center that will help us move forward to face these ever-present challenges.

Recruitment and retention of health care providers is one of the most difficult challenges facing rural facilities. It is common for physicians and mid-level providers to average 3-5 years length of employment at rural sites. This is true for a variety of reasons including opportunities for education, the satisfaction of spouses, heavier patient loads, and most commonly, call burden.

Our current medical staff is composed entirely of providers who grew up in the rural Carrington area. Carrington has providers who have been employed for 32, 23, and 12 years. Recently, as noted in a previous article, administration made the decision to employ providers whose sole responsibility is to provide 24/7 ER and hospital coverage. The result has been a marked improvement in provider satisfaction and undoubtedly will lead to longer provider retention and easier recruitment in the future.

The balance between a service offered and its feasibility is typically an ongoing issue at our facility. Administration must weigh not only the need for a service, but its cost and ability to pay for itself. A recent example of this was our purchase of 3-D mammography. It became obvious for our facility to remain current with standards of care and retention of patients, this service was a must.

In the past few years, Carrington Health Center has updated mammography, CT scanning, state of the art ultrasound, and continues with weekly MRI scanning. Our radiology staff is first rate with certifications in all these areas. CHI as a whole continues to pledge to keep its rural facilities up to date with advances in services, technology, and training.

A strong medical staff is essential to long-term stability and success. Carrington Health Center currently employs five clinic providers and three ER/hospital providers. Four of our clinic providers specialize in family medicine and have vast experience in ER call, trauma, and hospital care.

We are extremely fortunate to be one of the only rural facilities to employ a full-time psychiatric nurse practitioner, treating all age groups for the majority of all mood disorders. We employ a part-time surgeon who performs a variety of outpatient surgical procedures. Visiting specialists include urology, cardiology, orthopedics, and podiatry.

We now employ three mid-level providers with the sole responsibility of ER call and hospital care. This new program has led to improvements in efficiency and continuity of care in our hospital setting, allowing much more flexibility and provider satisfaction for our clinic staff.

Administration continues to push for patient education programs that improve overall health care for chronic illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease by initiating quality improvement goals and specialized nursing training to assist patients in lifestyle modification.

Our hospital nursing staff, besides providing inpatient and swing bed care, provide outpatient services including IV antibiotics, port flushes, remicade and iron infusions, prolia injections, PICC line cares, and pulmonary function testing.