PART SIX: Rural healthcare sees challenges, progress, CEO says
The future of health care brings a mix of challenges and improvements for Pointe Coupee Parish, according to the head of Pointe Coupee General Hospital.
“If you go back before 2000, we didn’t have all the Arbor clinics, so that’s a lot of primary-care practitioners that patients are seeing, and we’re handling those diagnostic tests for them. It has worked well for residents here, and it’s working well in other areas.”
The ability to attract specialists remains a challenge, but the access to primary-care clinics has been a bright spot in local health care, according to Pointe Coupee General CEO, Chad Olinde.
The limited availability of nurses and respiratory therapists has posed the biggest challenge for hospitals, large and small.
Pointe Coupee General endures the same brunt as the larger metro area hospitals, he said.
The nursing shortage figures as the toughest part of the dilemma, whether the hospital is in a city of 5,000 or 500,000.
“So many places around the United States now use agency nurses (also known as traveling nurses) and they offer big bucks to fill those positions,” Olinde said. “We’ve seen nurses leave their full-time jobs and take jobs in Colorado, or some area like that, for the big money.”
Pointe Coupee General has not yet lost any nurses due to travel nursing. Locally, the challenge has been how to fill vacancies when a nurse retires.
The difficulty in filling those positions prompted Pointe Coupee General to do something it had never done before.
“We’ve had to offer signing bonuses,” Olinde said.
Pointe Coupee General provided a $10,000 stipend to help fill jobs that went vacant when nurses retired.
To retain the stipend, those nurses had to remain on staff at least two years. Otherwise, they had to pay it back to the hospital.
“We have about five nurses (on the stipend program),” Olinde said. “Right now, we have all the nurses we need, so we’ve discontinued the program.”
The ability to attract respiratory therapists has become more difficult, particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The number of COVID-19 patients required respiratory therapists to manage those patients.
The hospital is not seeing many new COVID-19 patients, but the need – and salary demand – for respiratory therapists remains an issue.
“We’re not seeing that much of it now, but it’s like a big spike in housing or groceries in which the costs increase and don’t go down,” Olinde said.
“That’s what happened with respiratory therapists … we gave them all the extra pay, and it stayed up.”
The hospital doled out a $1-per-hour hazard pay increase during the pandemic, and that has remained a part of the employee salary.
In addition, the hospital gives cost-of-living pay raises based on the Consumer Price Index increase, which is now at 8.2 percent.
The hospital had to give a mid-year cost-of-living increase and the board of directors approved another for next year.
“It trickles down because everyone demands more now,” Olinde said.
COVID-19 has been the biggest gamechanger for Pointe Coupee General Hospital and, perhaps, every hospital in America and across the globe.
The pandemic led to a bigger emphasis on infection control.
“We had to make sure we weren’t spreading COVID-19,” Olinde said. “Employees or patients who got COVID-19 weren’t getting it here – they got it outside the hospital.”
The future …
For the next five years, Pointe Coupee General Hospital is hopeful that it can lure more specialists to the area.
Traffic tie-ups already make the drive to Baton Rouge cumbersome for commuters. The Interstate 10 roadwork – which will reduce roadways to two lanes in some areas – will exacerbate the situation, at least temporarily.
“People really don’t like driving to Essen Lane or Bluebonnet Road in Baton Rouge to see a specialist,” Olinde said.
“We want to do whatever we can to bring specialists to Pointe Coupee so people can have it right here in the parish.”
He said he realizes it’s easier said than done.
It's difficult to lure specialists to Pointe Coupee Parish when they have their own practice and reside in Baton Rouge or neighboring areas, Olinde said.
“It has to be specialists who are hungry enough to pick up additional work,” he said.
Patients already commute from West Baton Rouge Parish and the north end of Iberville Parish – Maringouin and Rosedale – to see physicians, get X-rays or lab work.
“Many of them have physicians right here on our campus, and when they’re ordered lab work, X-ray or other diagnostic tests, they come to our hospital for that,” Olinde said.
“Mainly, they’ll choose their physician and then they will choose us based on those local physicians, and we’re lucky because that physician group is growing all the time.”
Arbor Family Health has played a major role in that regard because it has added clinics throughout Pointe Coupee Parish and the northern portion of Iberville Parish, he said.
“If you go back before 2000, we didn’t have all the Arbor clinics, so that’s a lot of primary-care practitioners that patients are seeing, and we’re handling those diagnostic tests for them,” Olinde said. “It has worked well for residents here, and it’s working well in other areas.”
