
McGehee Hospital opened its $2.7 million rural health clinic last month, following a $10 million hospital expansion completed just last year.
The hospital is using the new structures as recruiting tools to attract physicians and nurses, said John Heard, the hospital’s president and CEO. “We haven’t had very much luck in the rural areas recruiting and retaining physicians,” he said. Physicians “don’t want to come back to rural areas.”
Heard hopes that doctors and nurses considering a move will be impressed with the expanded 23,000-SF hospital and new clinic and agree to work there. Heard, who has been at the hospital for 15 years, said that recruiting has been “pretty dire up to this point.”
The hospital has tried other tactics as well. In the past three to four years, for example, hospital officials seeking to recruit physicians have focused on people from the area who are in medical school. The hospital, McGehee Industrial Foundation and the Wallace Trust Foundation have provided a medical resident a $1,250 monthly stipend for three years. The resident has to repay the stipend with medical service to the hospital.
“If we treat him right, he can tell his people that are in medical school, ‘Hey these guys are really treating me really nice’ and get some more here,” Heard said.
Attracting doctors to the area is critical because two of the three physicians at the hospital are in their 70s, Heard said. “We’ve got to have those newer physicians so people will use us,” he said. “And that’s what we want to do.”
The hospital also is looking to hire a fourth physician. The hospital and the clinic have about 140 employees.
“We’re starting a growth phase,” Heard said. “Our next step is to get a couple more practitioners … in that clinic.”
Last month, the McGehee Family Clinic moved into a new 10,500-SF building about a quarter of a mile from the hospital. It had been in a building that was built in the 1970s and didn’t have the infrastructure to support modern medical equipment, Heard said. “We had been limping along in the clinic for several years,” he said.
The clinic now allows providers to perform lab tests and X-rays on patients. “You don’t have to come to the hospital,” Heard said.
The clinic has three physicians and one nurse practitioner. But it could use one more provider, he said.
The hospital’s expansion project was completed in May 2016 and features an emergency room with seven bays and new inpatient rooms. Until then, the hospital, built in the 1960s, had patient rooms with bathtubs and no privacy in its emergency room, Heard said.
“So basically it’s a new hospital,” Heard said. The older section of the hospital will be used as offices and storage areas.
To pay for the expansion, hospital officials had to go to the voters. The hospital sought to reallocate the approximately $550,000-$600,000 generated annually by an existing 1 percent sales tax. The tax was approved in 1999 for the operation and maintenance of the hospital, and in 2012, about 95 percent of voters approved reallocating it for the expansion.
The hospital reported net patient revenue of $9 million and a loss of $1 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2016, according to the most recent Medicare cost report filed with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. For the fiscal year that ended in June 2015, the hospital had net patient revenue of $8.4 million and a loss of $426,000.
McGehee Hospital also got financial support from the community and former residents to pay for the new clinic, said Bob Lucky, who was the capital campaign chairman and is now a member of the hospital board. He said the clinic received about 400 donations totaling about $1.9 million. The Wallace Trust Foundation also provided money for the clinic.
“There were a lot of people that gave $1,000 that may or may not could afford the $1,000,” said the owner of Lucky Chevrolet in McGehee. “But it meant something to them to give back to their hometown.”