The Medical Center of South Arkansas is in new hands after a staff uprising and the August resignation of CEO Scott Street, but it’s not exactly under new management.
Interim CEO Dwayne Blaylock is a veteran hospital administrator for the El Dorado hospital’s parent company, Community Health Systems Inc. of Franklin Tennessee, one of the nation’s top 10 by number of hospitals. The company, which had nearly $12 billion in 2020 revenue, is seeking a permanent CEO at the 166-bed hospital.
Blaylock, a Community Health executive and former CEO of River Oaks Hospital in Flowood, Mississippi, is proceeding with plans to switch MCSA’s emergency room and hospitalist staffing contractor amid a tight labor market in the pandemic. The staffing contractor change was one of several issues behind two votes of no confidence in Street by MCSA’s medical staff.
Street, the deposed CEO, isn’t out of work. He’s still with Community Health Systems in a yet unspecified role in northwest Arkansas, officials said. “Dwayne Blaylock has been serving as interim CEO since early September and will continue to ensure the hospital sustains operational momentum until a permanent CEO is named,” said Alexandria Bennett, MCSA’s executive director of business development.
Change in Staffing Vendor
On Aug. 9, in an email mentioning several changes at the medical center, Street announced that the hospital would be cutting ties with staffing vendor SCP Health. That is the company that several MCSA physicians are employed through, including Chief of Staff Dr. Ezinne Nwude and her husband, Dr. Ugo Nwude. The Nwudes were among the unanimous voters who expressed no confidence in Street.
Last week, Bennett said that the contract with SCP Health won’t be extended. “MCSA has selected a new vendor for hospitalists and emergency medicine physicians, and our relationship with SCP Health will end the first week of November,” she told Arkansas Business.
Emergency Staffing Solutions/Hospital Care Consultants of Dallas will be the new provider of those services. “ESS/HCC works with a number of hospitals in Arkansas and throughout the region,” Bennett said in a follow-up email.
Vicki Gilliam, attorney for nearly a dozen doctors in the no-confidence proceedings, said after Street’s resignation that her clients felt somewhat vindicated and hopeful that their opinions on patient safety will carry more weight with the new administration. But she warned of ongoing concerns about dropping SCP Health, a 2,000-employee company based in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Her clients’ requests for retaining SCP, Gilliam told the El Dorado News-Times’ Caitlan Butler in August, were fueled by worries that a change might “mean the replacement of long-serving community-acclimated and attached physicians with unfamiliar doctors who may be brought in to care for patients at MCSA.” It is unclear what effect the shift to ESS/HCC in November will have on the status of specific doctors in El Dorado.
Gilliam did not respond to messages from Arkansas Business, and Street himself, through an intermediary, declined to be interviewed. Rob Robinson, MCSA’s board leader and community president for Simmons Bank in El Dorado, did not respond to calls for comment, but he issued a statement in August thanking Street for his work at the medical center over four years of growth.
In his resignation email to the staff, Street called leaving MCSA one of the hardest transitions of his lifetime, but he said sometimes “a change is needed to move forward.” The former CEO of Nacogdoches Memorial Health in Texas had led the El Dorado hospital since October 2017 and presided over several expansions and renovations, including the Robert C. Tommey Conference Center, surgical recovery rooms, the ICU unit, ER and the hospital lobby.
He didn’t reveal his reasons for leaving, but Street noted the stress of health care work in the pandemic, which complicated staffing and drove long hours on the job. “We haven’t always managed these challenges perfectly, but I want you to know that I’ve always tried to do what I believe is the right thing for our team, our patients and our community.”
As of last week, Bennett said, MCSA was “caring for seven COVID patients, one of which is in the ICU.”
The medical center is an acute-care, Level 3 trauma center that was honored in 2020 as one of the Best Places to Work in Arkansas, as well being named Arkansas Business’ 2021 Business of the Year for companies with 151 to 499 employees.
Street, a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, said in his farewell email he’d been “inspired” by his time in El Dorado.
“Our employees are phenomenal, caring, dedicated people and I am thankful for the time I’ve had to work with you,” he wrote. “It has been — and still is — an honor.”
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