MHP continuing discussion on why expansion is needed

Mahaska Health Partnership's Jay Christensen sat down with Osky News on their plans going forward with construction.

In the middle of December, I spent some time talking with Jay Christensen. This has sparked an interest in myself to learn more not only about their project and what they had to say, but also what those in our community have to say about it as well. I am going to continue this with more of my interview with Christensen.

How many extra beds would the project add to your facility?

“None. Actually, we’re replacing our beds as a critical access hospital. There’s a limit to what we can do. We can only have 25 acute or skilled beds and we can have some observation beds. I’m not gonna spend a lot of time explaining, cause it’s hard to explain to an older person that’s in one of your beds that they’re still considered an outpatient, cause it doesn’t make any sense. It’s just how the regulations work.”

We can only have 25, what would traditionally be acute or skilled service patients, and then we can have some outpatient patient observation. They might be overnight, they might be checking to see if they meet criteria for admission, or they might be in need of extra recovery from surgical procedure and then go on home in the morning.

Are there any other services besides the surgical and the birthing center that you are going to be adding?

“No. We’re going to do a complete facility master plan of our remaining space of the remaining building. We will be talking about what needs to go where. We will have 2 years to do that, while we are building, with the idea that we’ll have square feet.”

Mahaska Health Partnership's semi-private rooms offer little extra space for visitors or modern equipment

People ask: Do you really need a new birthing center, when the current one, often sits idle?

“First of all, a Birthing Center is probably the most competitive of the businesses that we have and so people really do compare the surroundings to other locations.

A lot of times if your very ill, you go where your doctors going to send you. It’s not nearly as competitive, it’s still competitive, but birthing centers are very different. You know your healthy, you can drive, you can make all kinds of decisions and, yeah, we think it’s absolutely critical, especially since the others around us, that still deliver babies, have all updated theirs in the last couple years.

We really don’t have the space where it’s at to make it nice. We only really have 2 or 3 rooms that are of a sufficient size to do what we want to do.

Here we tend to run in bunches. We’ll have 5 or 6 patients and then we’ll have none. So yeah, it’s closed some of the time. We are also in the process of recruiting another physician that does obstetrics, that’s part of it.

There is also national data that indicates the birth rate is down in the country. Yeah, when you look at our births over a year, it’s absolutely critical.
That’s not where we started the project, but it’s probably the most critical from a competitive standpoint.

You want the room to be nice. Your not going to be there very long and you feel well enough to know the difference.

When you really look at it, it’s not closed as much as people think. But during stretches it is. Example: We had a very slow December. If you just do a little math backwards, it shows that March was a very active month for people planning for families. January, on the other hand, we have a lot of births scheduled.”

My last article in this series is HERE.