Harris prepared to deliver more babies

With the current expansion of its New Generations Family Birthing Center, Harris Regional Hospital couldn’t be in a better position to handle an anticipated influx of patients for labor and delivery services.

Community backlash ensues following AMC decision

Macon County residents have made a clear statement that they oppose Mission Health’s decision to discontinue labor and delivery services at Angel Medical Center in Franklin. 

Mission Health expands footprint in Haywood

fr missionMission Health opened a new $7 million medical complex in Haywood County this week offering an array of health care services in a jaw-dropping facility.

Blood donors show loyalty to Red Cross

fr redcrossThe new contract Mission Health signed with The Blood Connection for blood products will affect the American Red Cross’ collections in Western North Carolina, but Red Cross employees and volunteers hope donors will remain loyal to their cause.

The battle for blood: Mission Health changes blood supplier

coverLoyal blood donors will no longer see the iconic red cross on the side of the blood mobile next time they give blood at one of Mission Health’s 17 facilities in Western North Carolina.

Mission has signed a new contract with The Blood Connection, a regional blood bank out of Piedmont, South Carolina, to be its sole provider of blood for the next three years.

SEE ALSO: Blood donors show loyalty to Red Cross

Maternity care landscape evolves: Additional OB practices increases choices, competition

fr womenscareA shake-up in the medical world of maternity care and childbirth means more choices for pregnant women in Jackson, Swain and Macon counties, but also heightened competition for the profitable labor and delivery line.

Two new obstetrics practices were launched within weeks of each other this fall, both catering to women in Jackson, Macon, Swain and beyond. The number of existing practices in the region doubled nearly overnight. 

Mission moving in: Haywood Regional facing battle over home turf

Mission Health plans to expand its presence in Haywood County with a large medical complex housing doctors’ offices and a line of healthcare services.

The move is unwelcome competition for Haywood Regional Medical Center. But to Mission, it’s a reflection of “the strong preference that many Haywood County residents” have already shown by traveling to Asheville.

Sylva Pediatrics picks Mission to partner with

Three longtime doctors with Sylva Pediatrics will soon come under the wing of Mission Hospital in Asheville.

The physicians will keep practicing out of their same offices in Sylva and Bryson City, and keep serving the same local patients they always have. But come January they will be known as Mission Children’s Sylva and Mission Children’s Bryson City.

Caught in the crosshairs: Doctors struggle for footing in a shifting health care landscape

MedWest leaders are struggling to hold a fledgling joint hospital venture together in the wake of recent physician turmoil, but there’s likely no easy fix for the identity crisis faced by Jackson County’s medical community.

Fearing the sanctity of Harris hospital is on the line, a group of Jackson County doctors went public two weeks ago with a litany of concerns. They aren’t alone. Doctors everywhere are desperate for solid ground, but instead have been caught up in the competitive turf wars playing out between hospitals.

Both MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Haywood have seen a troubling loss of patients to Mission Hospital in Asheville in recent years. Harris lost 10 percent of its in-patient business in just five years, most of it to Mission. Haywood lost 6 percent.

Indeed, both hospitals hoped the MedWest joint venture two years ago would shore up that erosion of patients. Both, however, seemed to have different ideas of how that would play out on the ground.

Was there enough business for both to stay the size they were, or would one ultimately evolve into the big kid on the block — and if so, who?

SEE ALSO: Jackson doctors fear underdog status in MedWest venture

“Is there enough to go around for two? I don’t know the answer to that,” said Dr. Waverly Green, a pulmonologist at Harris.

It’s a troubling proposition for doctors who have married their livelihoods to a particular hospital — from building up their practice to raising their families here — to have their careers hinge on forces outside their control.

“It is challenging to know who is going to remain standing,” said Miriam Schwarz, the director of the Western Carolina Medical Society, a trade group for doctors in the region. “I think this jockeying for position is in response to the current climate.”

Schwarz said the “tumultuous times” have put everyone on edge.

“In this time of uncertainty, what we are witnessing across the country is heightened worries, anxieties and concerns about how health care will be delivered in the future,” Schwarz said.

 

Big kid on the block

When the MedWest venture was formed two years ago, Jackson’s medical community had little to fear from its neighbor.

“There has historically been very little market overlap,” said Steve Heatherly, the president of Harris.

Fewer than 5 percent of patients from Jackson migrated to neighboring Haywood or vice-versa.

“We said, ‘We’ve got enough to do, they’ve got enough to do and that’s the way it should be,” said Dr. Earl Haddock, a cardiologist at Harris for 22 years.

The result: two neighboring medical communities, largely happy to serve their own patient base and competing very little amongst each other.

“We’ve always had a collegial relationship. It has never been a competitive thing. They took care of their county and we took care of ours,” said Dr. Randy Savell, a gastroenterologist at Harris.

Haywood clearly had the tougher row to hoe, however. Just 25 minutes from Asheville, it was all-too-easy for patients who subscribed to the “bigger is better” theory to opt for Mission.

“It would be hard to survive in Mission’s shadow like that,” Green admitted.

Harris, however, had been largely spared from the specter of Mission. For decades, Harris acted as a net, capturing patients from the more rural counties to its south and west. It was far enough away that patients would only go to Mission if they really needed to, not just because they could.

And compared to the smaller, more rural counties around it, Jackson had a leg up simply by having a hospital at all.

“A lot of people west of here would stop at Harris because the roads to Asheville were bad, and there was at least a specialist here,” said Dr. Joe Hurt, a retired pathologist who helped build up Jackson’s medical community in the late-1970s and early ‘80s.

As a result, it had grown much bigger — both in the size of the hospital and the breadth of its doctors — than it ever could have been if drawing from just Jackson County’s population.

Patients from Swain, Macon and Graham counties plus the Cherokee Reservation accounted for nearly 50 percent of Harris’ total in-patient business. Only 45 percent of its in-patient volume comes from Jackson itself, according to market share data collected by the state.

 

Desperate times

It’s quite likely that Jackson’s medical community saw itself as poised to emerge as the epicenter of MedWest.

Not only did Haywood have the geographic conundrum of Mission to grapple with, it was still trying to rebound from a damaged reputation after failing federal inspections in 2008. It was an unfortunate turn of events blamed more on bureaucracy and bad leadership than a reflection of its health care, but a PR crisis nonetheless.

But, there were other forces at play. Chiefly, Harris was no longer immune to the siphoning effect of Mission.

While losing patients to Mission was a long-standing struggle for Haywood, Harris was not used to fighting that battle, and the hospital for the first time found its bottom line in jeopardy.

Harris is now in its third round of layoffs in four years. A wing of the hospital has been closed simply because there aren’t enough patients to fill it. Cash on hand had been dwindling, and finances got so bad the hospital could barely keep up with bills it owed, from medical supplies to the Red Cross blood bank.

Fear that it could now lose patients to Haywood — if suspicions are true that Haywood has been anointed as the flagship of MedWest — proved too much for Jackson doctors to bear. It’s entire model had been thrown into uncertainty, and a sense of panic set it.

“What Carolinas did was put us in competition with Haywood inside MedWest. Harris has to keep every patient it can to survive itself,” said Dr. Bob Adams, a hospitalist at Harris for 36 years who has decided to leave the hospital.

Not everyone shares that view, however.

“I certainly don’t get a sense of significant friction between the two,” said Steve Heatherly, the president of Harris.

For its part, the Haywood medical community doesn’t feel that way either.

“There is no friction, no competition,” said Dr. Marvin Brauer, the chief of staff at Haywood and a hospitalist there.

But, Brauer does think the two neighboring medical communities could do more to bridge the county line between them.

Every hospital has regular monthly meetings of its doctors. Since uniting under the MedWest venture, the doctors in Haywood and Jackson had not taken steps to hold periodic joint meetings of both hospitals, something that may change now.

“I think we should start to try to integrate the medical staffs even more,” Brauer said.

 

Circling the wagons

MedWest leadership sees one way out: buckle down and reclaim market share it has lost to Mission.

“The whole goal for us to join together was to take back some of the market share in our communities,” Dr. Chris Catterson, an orthopedist at Haywood, said.

That alone could solve everything.

“If we were each getting a reasonable market share, about 70 percent, there would be no problems,” Brauer said. That would mark about a 10 percent gain over the market share they have now.

Dr. Richard Lauve, a national health care industry consultant and analyst, questioned whether the strategy jives with the unstoppable reality that health care is consolidating.

“You can’t win back market share in a consolidating marketplace. A growth strategy is not one that wins,” said Lauve, with L&A Consulting based in Louisiana.

Granted, community hospitals have arguable advantages that resonate with patients, even when going head-to-head against the big guy next door.

“These are neighbors taking care of neighbors. The services are closer. You don’t have the cattle call mentality you get at the bigger facilities. Those are all advantages you can work to improve your position,” Lauve said. “But, they don’t move 10 percentage points of market share.”

That said, from a purely objective view, something has to give, Lauve said. Lauve was recently a guest speaker at a roundtable hosted by the Western Carolina Medical Society, attended by doctors and hospital CEOs from a dozen or so counties in the region.

Lauve’s answer was short and sweet when asked whether both Haywood and Harris could keep up their historical model: “No.”

Two mirror-image hospitals of that size simply can’t exist in neighboring rural communities 20 miles apart.

“You can’t repeat services that close together and make them both work,” Lauve said. “One of them will either fail completely and the other survive — or they need to sit down and make decisions about what makes sense for each community to have.”

In Lauve’s view, it’s time for those tough choices. And that might mean each hospital won’t have everything it had before.

“It is a political process — the interaction of human beings trying to figure out how to divide a pie,” Lauve said.

 

Fold or draw?

That’s one reason some Jackson doctors believe the right thing for their community is to get out and get out now. If one of the two hospitals is destined to get smaller, why keep heading down a path that is setting up their hospital to shrink?

Adams fears that die has already been cast.

“Harris devolves, and Haywood grows. It is not that they have anything against Harris. (Carolinas HealthCare) has an interested in right-sizing their components,” said Adams.

But, Jackson doctors say any strategy to make Haywood the new net to capture health care business from the rural western counties is flawed, because of the same long-standing geographic conundrum Haywood has always struggled under.

“You aren’t going to get most of the people in Western North Carolina to stop 25 miles short of Asheville to go to Haywood,” Hurt said. Once in the car and on the road, they’ll go the extra miles, he said.

Adams said it would take years to change the historical  patterns of patients. If their own community hospital can’t do it, they will just go to Mission rather than the community hospital in another county, which patients would see as merely a lateral move.

“It is not a suburb of Atlanta or Charleston or Charlotte where a whole bunch of people who are moving in from somewhere else without a history or tradition can be influenced by marketing where to go,” Adams said.

In recent months, Adams and a group of Jackson doctors have advocated walking away from MedWest and instead partnering with Mission.

A mercenary stance perhaps, but they hope Harris would be built up by Mission as a go-to hospital for the western counties, a catch-all for health care from the rural west.

Adams said he understands why Haywood’s medical community would see Mission as simply too close for comfort.

“I think the medical community in Haywood County would be very concerned about Mission because I think they would feel more threatened,” Adams said. “Clearly, because of the proximity, it is a bigger concern for the Haywood community than for Harris.”

But, Jackson should look out for Jackson first, he said.

“For each hospital and each community who is the best partner for that individual community? I think that the communities may have different perspectives about that,” Adams said.

Not all Jackson County doctors are sold on Adams’ line of thinking, however. Several voiced their trepidation toward Mission at a hospital-wide meeting of Harris doctors in January. Adams’ camp had called on their fellow doctors at the meeting to send a message up the chain to Harris’ board of directors: they were unsatisfied with MedWest and wanted to vet Mission as a prospective new partner.

A few doctors were not swayed, however.

“The people who voted against it were concerned about their perception of Mission’s behaviors over the past 20 years where they had been aggressive and wanted everything to come to Asheville,” Adams said. But,“We felt that Mission’s attitude had changed significantly.”

The game-changer, in Adams view, is the new CEO who took over at Mission two years ago, Ron Paulus.

The former CEO, Joe Demore, was seen as an empire builder, one who was interested in grabbing up smaller hospitals in Mission’s net to promote an Asheville-centric model. Demore was ultimately forced out after a vote of no confidence by doctors practicing at Mission.

When Paulus came on board, he immediately began touting a collaborative regional view of health care, with small community hospitals across Western North Carolina working together under one system.

Paulus maintains Mission doesn’t want to compete with the smaller hospitals but genuinely wants to let them keep their own patients except when Mission’s services are truly needed.

The claim has been taken with a grain of salt, however, particularly in Haywood where there’s evidence of Mission planting its own doctors in Haywood’s backyard to steal patients. Mission has also made offers to buy out existing doctors’ practices in Haywood.

Adams said MedWest is so obsessed with competing against Mission — even paranoid — that patients’ interests aren’t being put first.

“At some point the region has to decide whether they want a competitive or collaborative health care system,” Adams said.

What might look like collaboration to Mission might look like undermining local health care to others, however.

Ultimately, the board of directors for both Harris and the MedWest system have thrown their support behind the current model.

“The boards have essentially said the organization of MedWest is the structure they are committed to at this time,” Heatherly said.

Haywood doctors agree it is the best route forward.

“We think the best thing for our communties is to be under one umbrella serving our communities of Haywood, Jackson and Swain,” said Dr. Chris Catterson, a Haywood orthopedist.

 

What now?

While the call by Jackson doctors to withdraw from MedWest seems like a shot across the bow to their neighbors in Haywood, Jackson doctors said they didn’t intend it that way. They aren’t questioning the quality or caliber of health care at Haywood’s hospital or by Haywood doctors.

Simply, they don’t think Carolinas HealthCare — the major hospital network managing MedWest — truly has their best interest at heart. Carolinas, as the new variable in the equation, has born much of the criticism from the group of Jackson doctors.

Carolinas has 34 hospitals in its network. Some it owns outright. Others, as with MedWest, pay Carolinas an annual fee for its management services and the benefit of being part of a larger system.

Carolinas’ interest in MedWest goes beyond that annual fee, however.

The more patients it represents, the more leverage it has when bargaining for better reimbursement rates from insurance companies and the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs. Those reimbursements have been dwindling, and what insurance and Medicare are willing to pay often no longer cover the actual cost of providing the health care. Ultimately, that’s the driver in the consolidation of healthcare and jockeying for market share.

“They are playing the corporate practice of medicine,” Adams said. “I don’t want to be a pawn in somebody else’s power struggle and be used as a widget in a big business’ plan for their benefit.”

But that’s the reality, said Lauve, the health care industry analyst. Things won’t go back to the way they were.

“Be a part of the change instead of resisting or ignoring it,” Lauve said, encouraging physicians to engage in the process.

“If you believe the fundamental driving forces are not going to go away, the peaceful coexistence of yesteryear is not an option. You are ignoring the elephant in the room. You are saying ‘I just want to get in another five years until I retire,’” Lauve said.

There’s two strategies left: compete head-to-head or collaborate.

“If you compete, one loses and one wins, but even the winner is worse off five years later than all the systems you compare it to that chose to collaborate,” Lauve said, citing a case study by the Voluntary Hospital Association.

Or, “You can figure out a way to collaborate and be part of the system that rationalizes how care is delivered,” Lauve said.

Miriam Schwarz with the Western Carolina Medical Society said physicians would much rather be taking care of patients but have found themselves trapped in a microcosm of a much larger national debate.

“I think the fact that physicians are so isolated and don’t have the opportunity to communicate across county lines, that has exacerbated the polarization that has been created by the institutions,” Schwarz said. “All they know is what their institutions are telling them but haven’t talked to their counterparts to get the whole story.”

Schwarz said physicians across the region need to come together — rise above it all so to speak — and work collaboratively, something the Western Carolina Medical Society hopes to serve as the mechanism for.

Previously, the organization was known as the Buncombe County Medical Society, but a year ago, it changed its name to reflect its regional mission. It has 900 members, with 125 now from outside Buncombe County.

“One of the goals we have as a regional medical society is to cultivate physician-to-physician dialogue in a safe setting,” Schwarz said. “Hopefully, physicians can put aside the politics and institutional affiliations and the pressures that are put upon them by those institutions and really focus on excellent patient care.”

Two months ago, doctors from more than a dozen hospitals in the region came together for an all-day summit at a country club in Haywood County in hopes of bridging the divide. Schwarz said it gave her hope.

“When they are sitting across the table from each other, the posturing that happens when people are really afraid or concerns about how to practice medicine in this chaotic world melt away,” Schwarz said.

Doctors take a stand out of fear for MedWest-Harris’ future

When Dr. Bob Adams walked into a hospital-wide meeting of Jackson County doctors in early January, he believed he had finally mustered the critical mass to demand action, action that so far had been elusive despite a year of working internally to bring change.

But, he made a fatal miscalculation. The message doctors would ultimately send up the chain that night to the WestCare board of directors would be rejected.

Some doctors had become disillusioned with the Charlotte-based management firm that had been at the helm of the MedWest venture since its inception two years ago. They voted 31 to 3 to ask the board of directors to go to Mission Hospital, hear what it had to say and consider whether it would be a better partner.  

It’s rare for the majority of doctors at a hospital to make a formal and pointed request to their board of directors. The issue had been escalating for months by then, and as the community would later learn, had not yet reached its climax.

A core group of concerned doctors began meeting in early 2010, discussing their perception of problems at Harris, which was struggling financially and had lost 10 percent of its inpatient business to Mission. Initially, they took their issues up directly with MedWest CEO Mike Poore. Unsatisfied, however, they opened a line of communication with the hospital board of directors, sitting down with key members in one-on-one meetings.

SEE ALSO: Carolinas affiliation catalyst for doc's departure

By summer, however, the airing of concerns became a standing topic at the monthly meetings of all the Harris’ physicians, marked by a heated exchange or two with Poore before the roomful of doctors.

Eventually, Poore knighted the core group of concerned doctors with an official title — the “kitchen cabinet” committee — in an apparent attempt to address the issues.

Meanwhile, doctors ramped up their line of communication with the hospital board, a rather brazen move to go over Poore’s head.

“We go in and sit down and talk and start expressing our concerns directly to the board,” said Dr. Randy Savell, a long-time gastroenterologist at Harris. “They were surprised. They suggested they had no idea how things were.”

The meetings with the board continued for several weeks, and while the board members were willing listeners, the doctors couldn’t spur them to take action.

“We never got anywhere, but they were being very surprised and shocked and concerned,” Savell said.

Some in the core group oscillated between caring about the management structure and just going back to doing what they did best: caring for patients.

“After a while, you get worn out. You get tired of fighting,” said Dr. Earl Haddock, a pulmonologist at Harris.

Two of the doctors in the “kitchen cabinet” had been on the hospital board themselves but had resigned earlier that year after growing disenchanted.

“The thing that struck me is nobody asks questions,” Dr. Waverly Green said of why he resigned from the board. “If it was a place where there would be honest discussion and be about the future of the hospital, I am happy to be a part of that. but I am not going to sit in a room and rubber stamp things that to me make no sense.”

 

Between a rock and a hard place

The group of concerned doctors decided to take matters into their own hands. In December, some of them drove to Asheville for a behind-the-scenes meeting with the CEO of Mission, Ron Paulus. It was a renegade move, unauthorized by the rest of the medical community at large, but they liked what they heard.

So in early January, they called a meeting of all the doctors under WestCare and asked them to take a stand. Discussion dragged on for more than an hour.

Getting out of the MedWest partnership wasn’t an easy proposition. There was an escape clause built in at the three-year mark, but it could only be exercised by a three-fourths majority of the MedWest board, which was comprised equally of seven members each from WestCare — comprised of Harris and Swain hospitals — and Haywood Regional.

But, there was a little-known loophole. A clause in the MedWest contract allowed either side to pull out if the financial viability of one of the partners was at risk. It just so happened there was bad financial trouble brewing next door in Haywood. The Haywood hospital was running so low on cash, word on the street was it might not be able to make payroll.

To solve the short-term cash flow crunch, Haywood had gone up the chain to Carolinas for an emergency loan. Harris, however, was being asked to co-sign for the loan, putting its own revenue stream on the hook should Haywood default.

In realty, Harris would never be asked to cough up the money. Haywood’s revenue stream — about $100 million annually — along with all its equipment and its hospital building were also on the hook as collateral and would be tapped first before Harris would ever have to ante up. Essentially, there was more than $250 million guaranteeing a $10 million loan.

But, Carolinas was outside its comfort zone. This marked the first time it had ever loaned money to any of the 34 hospitals it manages. So it wanted the kitchen sink as collateral.

The Jackson doctors theorized the financial straits at Haywood were grave enough to exploit the loophole and engage in talks with Mission.

Little did the doctors know, however, that the WestCare board faced a grave choice — co-sign the loan to help bail out Haywood or comply with their own doctors’ request to meet with Mission. Doing both, it turned out, would not be an option. There was a catch to the loan with Carolinas. As long as MedWest owed Carolinas, the hospitals were prohibited from negotiating with a new partner.

Business-wise, it made sense. Carolinas didn’t want to prop up MedWest only to have it walk away still owing money. But to the unhappy physicians, it played out like a game of Mousetrap — and they were the ones sitting under the cage.

 

Harris board backs Carolinas

The WestCare board ultimately had faith in the MedWest venture and co-signed Haywood’s loan.

“We believe the future is bright for all three hospitals, even though the challenges are many. It is time to look forward, assuring the full potential of MedWest-Haywood, MedWest-Harris and MedWest-Swain is realized,” the MedWest board said in a statement this week. “Is this a short-term process? No, it is not. It will take months of hard work. But, we are confident in the expertise of our medical staffs and in the skill and dedication of all our employees.”

The doctors, however, felt ignored in their pleas to consider other options.

“We said ‘We aren’t telling you to dump Carolinas.’ We are just saying go talk to Mission and see if we made the best choice,” said Dr. Waverly Green, a pulmonologist at Harris. “Two days later, they signed documents that tied us up even tighter to Carolinas. That told me the board didn’t want input from the medical staff.”

One of the board members, Bob Carpenter, resigned from the board a few days later in a show of solidarity with the doctors.

“The bottom line is our hospital is in serious shape, and our trustees need to be looking at alternatives,” Carpenter said. “The community needs to keep pressure on the board to seek alternatives and do the right thing for this community.”

It turns out Harris was not merely hamstrung by Haywood’s loan. Harris was beholden to Carolinas for its own financial security as well. Carolinas had pulled strings to help Harris out of a pinch over an outstanding $15 million loan with BB&T, dating back to hospital construction projects a decade ago. Under terms of the loan, BB&T required Harris to have 75 days cash on hand.

Last year, Harris wasn’t able to maintain that balance and dipped below the cash-on-hand threshold that BB&T required. Carolinas tapped its relationships in banking circles, essentially putting in a good word for Harris, and convinced BB&T to temporarily relax its cash-on-hand requirement.

Harris currently has 56 days of cash-on-hand instead of the mandated 75. If Harris sent Carolinas packing, it could jeopardize the leniency BB&T had extended on the loan terms.

The door had been closed on any escape hatch Harris may have had, Savell said.

To be clear, the concerned doctors don’t believe in a conspiracy by Carolinas to make the hospitals financially dependent as a way of keeping MedWest intact. Adams thinks Carolinas just wasn’t paying close enough attention to the day-to-day operations, which after all is the expertise Carolinas was supposed to be providing in exchange for its management fee.

“They would never have allowed them to spend what they spent at Haywood without having the resources to back it up,” Adams said. “They would never have allowed Harris to be run in the ground even if that was a planned maneuver because it created a huge backlash. You don’t poison the components.”

John Young, a vice-president for Carolinas’ western hospitals, said that Carolinas doesn’t tell MedWest what to do — it’s the other way around.

“We work for the local boards. We have no control mechanism,” Young said.

 

A unique community of physicians

It’s rare to find physicians and hospital management in lockstep on everything. Now, however, the WestCare board must find a way to rebuild the fractured relationship with physicians.

“For every member of the medical staff that has talked to the board, to walk away feeling like nothing was going to be done was a difficult thing for us,” said Dr. Earl Haddock, a cardiologist at Harris.

It marked a departure from an amicable relationship the Jackson medical community had always had with its board of trustees.

“There was never any adversarial relationship. It was collaborative across the spectrum. We all worked together for the same goals. I think the thing that has been particularly uncomfortable for the medical community in these last two to three years is that relationship no longer applies,” Adams said.

A saying by a patriarch of the Harris medical community has been reverberating in Jackson County for nearly 40 years, handed down through practices and still preached to new recruits today.

“Sylva is where you can practice contemporary medicine in the old-fashioned style,” so the saying goes. It was coined by Bill Aldis, an internal medicine specialist who came to Harris in the mid-1970s.

Aldis was part of a dynamic trio of upstart internal medicine specialists who sought out Sylva after medical school as a place to make their mark, perhaps even a social experiment of sorts. Their mission: to take a rural hospital with a smattering of primary doctors and see how far they could take it.

“They were at John Hopkins together and decided they were going to find a place where they could make an impact,” said Dr. Joe Hurt, a retired pathologist who came to Harris in 1978. Hurt came partly because he was impressed by the three young internists who had thrown themselves headlong into building up a rural medical institution.

“There was a tremendous amount of potential,” Hurt said.

The energy was infectious. Each new specialist who came on board joined the recruiting crusade, putting their best foot forward as a medical community to build up their own ranks in partnership with the hospital.

“A lot of the recruiting parties and events were actually held at my house,” Hurt said. “Some of the contracts between partners were worked out at my house.”

In the decade from 1975 to 1985, the number of doctors practicing in Jackson County more than doubled, bringing in the county’s first orthopedists, pathologists, radiologists and surgeons. More by fate than design, the community attracted a certain breed of physician — those who didn’t care about the lack of a country club or golf course, Hurt said.

Those early efforts set Harris on a track that still persists.

“Harris has had a long-standing tradition of attracting very good physicians. Part of the attraction was for a small hospital, this had an exceptional medical staff. Well-trained physicians, very community-oriented. There was a rapport between the physicians and community that didn’t exist elsewhere. The hospital just had a very good reputation,” Green said.

 

All still support local hospital

There’s one thing both sides in the debate agree on: keep going to your local hospital.

“In terms of the services, we can and should provide in our local hospitals, we are as good as anyone in the country,” the MedWest board of directors said in a statement this week.

Undermining Harris is indeed the last thing those speaking out want to do.

“There are those who felt the community deserved to know. Hopefully, there will be enough of a outcry to have an impact,” Savell said.

But, the 2,000 employees of MedWest in Haywood, Jackson and Swain counties have surely felt the sting of the negative publicity during the past week.

“I care for every single patient with every ounce of my being,” said Heather Sheppard, a nurse at Harris and director of ICU. “I stand by the care that we deliver to every single patient at Harris.”

In Haywood County, a letter was signed by 29 doctors this week reinforcing their strength and resolve to provide excellent health care.

“We believe and have substantial data to corroborate that the care at Haywood hospital is, like the care at Harris hospital, something the community can take great pride in,” the letter states.

Dr. Joe Hurt, a retired pathologist at Harris, said going public was clearly a last resort for Adams after months of working through internal channels that got him nowhere.

“I don’t think any of them wished ill against the hospital,” said Hurt.

Savell agreed that’s not what this struggle is about.

“Good care is still there. Good people are still there,” Savell said.

Even those who have publicly stood beside Adams plan to stick with Harris to the end.

“I love what I do. I love the patients. I love the hospital, and by golly, we provide excellent care, and we want to get back to that,” Haddock added.

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