Clinic begins restructuring, retraining

Wahkiakum Family Practice Clinic is now solidly under renovation!

There is much underway that we’d like to share with the community. We’ve begun by identifying Patient Care as top priority, knowing that the community will find it easier to support this clinic if we make efforts to increase the value of service. With staff retraining and reassignment, you’ll see evolving improvements in phone service, appointment and acute scheduling, efficient check-in and visit process, quicker testing, medication refills, phone call returns, better diagnostic result reports from your visit, and a quieter relaxing environment. This won’t happen overnight and in fact will look a little chaotic before everything comes together.

Your visit should go more smoothly with shorter wait times and more efficiency throughout the visit as we reach our goals. Like any business under renovation, it’s tempting to want to limit business while restructuring. We’ve chosen not to do that understanding that we need to remain available in service. We ask for your patience and support during this next two to three months as our staff learns and implements new systems, and as new staff are welcomed and trained. I invite and welcome your comments, I am using them.

We’re excited to welcome the generosity of two rural health clinic managers from the Rural Health Clinic Association this week that will spend two days reviewing and assessing our operations. They have long been involved in rural clinic management and currently manage two successful rural health clinics on the coast. They are well suited to give us thoughts and ideas how we might solve some of our unique challenges. Our deepest appreciation goes to both of them for this extraordinary offer.

We’ve also begun discussions how we might solve the problem of local residents who have insurance that requires them to use services other than WFPC. We’re not sure we can solve it, but we’d sure like to try. We want to be available to everyone in this community who wants to use the clinic.

The biggest and most exciting news at Wahkiakum Family Practice Clinic is that we’d like to introduce to you, the community, how you might help. After much discussion and soul searching by County Commissioners, WFPC Advisory Board Members, and we at WFPC, we’ve placed our confidence in simply asking you to give. We call it the Keep the Clinic Open Fund (KCO Fund). We have experienced a deficit of between $250,000 to $295,000 per year, and acknowledge a total patient base of around 3200. If every adult patient gave $120 for the year 2009 we believe we will make the budget work. We know that many can’t afford to give, and ask that if you can, please give for them! Or you can give in the name of your neighbor or family or friend who can’t. We expect our efficiency changes to help a lot, but it will take some six months before we see our revenue increase in relationship to cost. We will accept and respond to gifts given directly to the clinic, or you can give to the entity of your choice in the clinic’s name. We’re working with local resources to find other funding support as well, like grants. We welcome any and all support and greatly appreciate every penny. We’ve started talking about special fun KCO Fundraisers, and welcome all ideas and creativity in this effort.

This community is in a unique position. You can do what government, large health organizations, and smaller city clinics can’t do. You can decide to keep your clinic open and come together as a community to make it work. You have a good team of hard-working knowledgeable people working to revive the clinic’s operations and finances. We’re pretty sure we can make it work but we need more time as there are hundreds of things to do. Funding ends in December, and we need the clinic to live long enough to mature the work being done. Please give as you can, this is a community resource you simply can’t lose.