As members of the Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County Board of Trustees, we would like to comment on the recent county commission meeting at which hospital board members addressed the proposed ambulatory surgery center.
As reported by the Green River Star, two commissioners alleged that the public is losing faith in the hospital’s administration. While the benefits and cost of the proposed ASC have been widely discussed, both in county commission and hospital board public hearings, the issue of public confidence in the administration seems to be important enough to some commissioners that it surfaces in nearly every discussion between the two boards and should be addressed.
Anyone who has witnessed the growth both in numbers and quality of health services offered by the hospital over the past five years would conclude that the hospital must have had extraordinary leadership. Before Jerry Klein and his administrative staff took the reins of the hospital, there had been what best could be described as administrative chaos. There had been at least three CEO’s in five years and excessive turnover in all departments. The public was demanding more and better services and more doctors including specialists. Klein was hired and was charged with creating order from disorder, stabilizing revenues and expenses, creating a hospital employed medical group with a variety of family practice and specialty doctors as well as highly qualified physicians assistants and nurse practitioners and technicians. He was, in fact, charged with carrying out the board’s mission and vision.
After five years of Klein’s leadership, we now have a highly qualified and diverse hospital medical staff which includes specialties and treatment modalities only dreamed of five years ago. We have measurably better emergency services with fewer referrals to Salt Lake City doctors and hospitals, a first class dialysis unit, a cancer treatment center, soon to have a valuable Huntsman Center affiliation, expanded and improved laboratory and imaging capabilities and many more choices in family medicine, OB/GYN, surgery, urology, ENT, psychiatry, pediatrics, addiction medicine and both radiation and medical oncology. Klein was able to forge a very valuable affiliation, the first of its kind, with the University of Utah Medical Center, which brought with it many other important improvements to health care in the county. The list of important accomplishments goes on and on.
When the board hired Klein, it was with the understanding that he and his family were facing some challenges, some of which are nobody else’s business, that would require his maintaining two residences, one here and one in Ohio. He promised that his travel to and from Ohio would not interfere with his ability to run the hospital, and it hasn’t. The commissioners who claim that county residents have lost confidence in the hospital’s administration point to no particular complaint except that Klein doesn’t own a home in Sweetwater County. Our answer to that is one, the board knew that may be the case when we hired him and, two, he has never missed an important meeting or function because of it. If he is required to be out of town, he always joins committee meetings by phone. To our knowledge, he has only missed one or two board meetings in five years.
In addition, Klein has involved himself with other community service, including active Chamber of Commerce membership and membership on the airport board and active involvement with United Way. Other administrators on his staff have shown great loyalty to him, to the board and to the hospital’s mission and vision. As a result, our hospital, your hospital, has shown and will continue to show tremendous growth in quality.
And, finally, the proposed Ambulatory Surgery Center is only being proposed by the hospital board of trustees because it is needed. For many reasons, all thoroughly studied by the board and its advisors which include experts in the field of public facilities financing, bond rating and hospital construction, the board has proposed construction of an ambulatory surgery center with adjoining medical office space for surgeons who operate in the facility. The recently opened medical office building is already over capacity because of the number of physicians who have joined the hospital medical staff and recruitment of other needed specialists is being curtailed because of a lack of office and clinical space.
The county commissioners, who we believe want what is best for the county and our hospital, feel that we should wait, possibly two years, to have the voters determine if the estimated $50-million project should be paid for from the special purpose 6th penny tax. All of the expert consultants to the hospital board advise that the hospital can pay for the project from current and projected revenues. As reported, the hospital trustees feel that if, as indicated by those professionals, the hospital can pay for the project with doctor and hospital generated revenues, the proceeds of the sixth penny tax can be used for other needed public projects. Several financial institutions are so confident in our ability to repay the debt through revenue bonds that they have offered to build and finance the project and lease it back to the hospital and incur all the financial risk. Of course, the county commissioners would have to approve and they have indicated that they will not.
But to the point of the Star article, in our many combined years of public service on college boards, school boards, fair board, civic center boards, city council and hospital board as well as other boards and commissions, we have rarely seen greater administrative excellence than we have observed in Jerry Klein and his staff. It is true that people in his position will occasionally make enemies when they make tough decisions and that some of those enemies will relentlessly criticize every subsequent move.
That is probably the reason that there is such a high turnover in hospital administrators. But, make no mistake about it, Klein and his assistants are true professionals who have only the best interests of county residents at heart. We hate to think what our hospital and our medical community might look like without them.
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