Shoshone Medical Center shows off new facilities
Photo by Josh McDonald Shoshone Medical Center CEO Jerry Brantz cuts the ceremonial ribbon held by Beth Bates and Jerry Cobb during SMC’s open house for the newly remodeled wing. Members of the Silver Valley and Wallace Chambers of Commerce were on hand as well.
Shoshone Medical Center held a ribbon cutting and open house ceremony Wednesday night to celebrate the opening of their newly remodeled wing where they now house facilities for cardiac rehabilitation, cardiac testing and monitoring, endoscopy, pulmonary rehabilitation, respiratory therapy, and wound care.
Prior to the small group tours, SMC chief executive officer Jerry Brantz cut the ceremonial ribbon and then addressed the large crowd.
“Despite growing shortages in the medical staff across America, our board has continued to keep the mission going to improve what we do at this hospital,” Brantz said. “Last year alone we saw $1.6 million in bad debt here at the hospital, so I want to thank the board for continuing our vision and putting quality first and allowing us to do what we did here.”
From there, Brantz detailed the new services in the remodeled wing.
“We are able to accommodate five services in this area,” Brantz said. “We've brought in respiratory therapy which we had before, but we've been able to enhance those. We brought in some new PFT (Pulmonary Function Test) equipment that allows us to do the full PFT exam.”
The cardiac services are particularly exciting for the area as well.
“We brought in a new treadmill for cardiac stress testing,” Brantz said. “We have opened up cardiac rehab which is a brand new service in the area. Before this, patients would have to drive over the hill for this service for any sort of cardiac rehabilitation monitoring or program which is just hard for a lot of people. Since we opened it January, we have seen twice of what we expected by this time.”
From there Brantz continued with the rest of the programs.
“We brought in Pulmonary rehab in March of 2015, this just allowed us to expand that service,” Brantz stated. “Wound care is a service that we heard from the physicians from the nursing homes and being able to take care of that acute type of issue. Some patients have to go in everyday or every other day and they had to travel over the hill and that can be hard to keep up with. The last thing we brought back were the scopes (endoscopy). We had them when we did surgery, but they went away when surgery did.”
Despite the reported debt the hospital had last year, these new additions were not part of it.
“We pay cash for everything we do here,” Brantz said. “If we can’t afford it right then, then we plan according.”
For more information call Shoshone Medical Center at (208) 784-4618.