The health care landscape in Fort Smith is changing. This spring, Little Rock-based Baptist Health announced it was shuttering several departments at its Fort Smith hospital. Labor, delivery and obstetrics closures were announced in March. Then in April, inpatient departments including infectious disease services, nephrology, oncology and pulmonary. Talk Business & Politics reports the hospital has reported a loss of more than $120 million since 2018, and the hospital has issued statements it plans to bolster other services, including emergency. But as Dr. Jessiela Roberts says, loss of services can be challenging for individuals and for a city. But those challenges are not impossible to conquer.
Dr. Roberts: We're able to mobilize a community response because at the end of the day, health is not just what happens in the doctor's office. It's really a community-led movement. And if we can get people to get back to taking ownership of their neighbors and checking on your elderly neighbors, do they have transportation, or do they have access to their medicine? Really getting back to having the church mobilize their congregation and not just being spiritually equipped, but also being healthier. And who do we call if we have a question?
Dr. Roberts, who practices family medicine and is on the faculty at UAMS, is part of a town hall tomorrow night to help people navigate the shifting healthcare landscape. Among the others participating in the town hall, Talicia Richardson, NAACP Sebastian County branch president, and Dr. Daphne MacBruce, pulmonology and critical care medicine at Mercy Fort Smith. Dr. Roberts says the idea for tomorrow night's town hall is not to be about fear, but about empowerment.
MacBruce: It's a very challenging time in healthcare right now. And while it's challenging and some of the message sounds a bit abysmal, we are hoping that people will understand that there is hope and there's a way to navigate this in a personal way that would help them to access healthcare in a pretty difficult time.
Roberts: I think the biggest thing is, again, not to overwhelm people with fear, but to empower people to know that there is still, as Dr. MacBruce says, hope. There's still a pathway to access good quality health care, but it's just going to take a lot of ownership and a lot of preplanning, asking the right question, and personal effort to figure out how to do that. And so we want to at least create that bridge where we can start the conversation and provide those tools.
Kellams: When you receive news like this in a city, and it may affect you personally because the department, the doctor that you were seeing is in limbo or might be going, what can that do to a patient?
Dr. MacBruce: For us as physicians, even though we're physicians, our family members still have to navigate this and we ourselves have to navigate this as well. Particularly since we're getting older, we both had birthdays recently. And so access to care is now limited by the fact that we have only limited access. And you know what I mean? It sounds roundabout, but right now there's not as many physicians or services available. And so access to care is limited in that way. And so it takes a little bit more planning, like you said, and a little bit more effort to be able to do it. It's still doable, but you just have to know the right way to do it. And on a personal note, we're working in a little bit of a difficult time because we have to be able to do a lot more than what we were doing before. And that's going to impact us personally in terms of things like physician burnout or dissatisfaction. But also personally, because I still have to take my husband or my daughter to the doctors. And so we're doing this on a personal level as well, making sure that we have access to our own records, making sure we have access to our kids' records and our spouses' records. And we've talked about with some of the sessions that we've been through being able to access your electronic medical records. It's called MyMercy here at Mercy and MyChart at some other facilities. But being able to access that — I know I can get my husband and my daughter on mine, like when I go online and sign in I can get everything. And so we still have to do that personally ourselves. We still have to use health care like everybody else.
Dr. Roberts: So Kyle, could I add something? This is what I'm seeing. And this is a stark reality. Imagine being in the middle of your cancer treatment and then getting notice that your hospital that provides that service is divesting away and your oncologist is moving and not knowing where and your care is delayed. So these are some of the practical things that patients are currently dealing with. Alongside that, we no longer have inpatient hospice in this area. And so that is another challenge. So you have longer wait times, you have loss of certain specialties altogether. And so it's creating a domino effect. ER wait times are longer. Imagine having to wait 13 months to see some specialists. Therefore disease processes are going to hasten because of delayed treatment. Some people may unfortunately, tragically die because they may get — by having the long ER waits. And so it is a multi-pronged domino effect that's happening. And so we feel just a really urgent need to get patients, patients' families, the community aware but empowered. There are still things that they can do, even as we navigate this for ourselves.
Richardson: And to add a little bit to that, Kyle, there are also a multitude of physicians in this city who felt that this was coming and they were trying to manage care amidst the unspoken that were going on. So the NAACP was contacted months ago before this announcement. However, to respect confidentiality and the livelihood of some of these physicians, we had to wait for things to come to notice if they did not want their names out in public. So there are people that their livelihoods are tied into this, but they have an ethics, they have a code that they need to live by. They're trying to educate as many people as possible with regard to access to care. And we haven't even got on the topic of being underinsured in this or losing coverage. This is for the people that have some type of coverage. And we know that there are people losing their coverage left and right across our state. So this is not a Fort Smith or Sebastian County issue. It is nationwide. But we have to make sure that our community knows what's available, and we try to assist in the navigation with quality resources that are here. And it's our hope that more doctors may come and say, hey, we want to join this. We want to educate more as well. Because these two ladies, this just happened organically based on Pastor Stanley Whitmore, who is the second vice president of the NAACP and his testimony to me. And I'm like, okay, we need to do something about this. What are we going to do? And from there, within 48 hours, there was a plan in place due to his efforts to mobilize within the Black churches in the community and then just building, building, building from there. So even though he's not able to join us today due to technology issues, I want to just really make sure that his effort of sharing the story and walking around the ER, praying for people that were bleeding and needing urgent care — he would be better at sharing his story than I. But if he had not seen it for himself — and these are his words — I wouldn't have believed it. I would not have believed it. And he said, but now I'm a believer. And so his testimony, he wants to share, share, share, share.
Kellams: This is, I think — correct me if I'm wrong — this is what the NAACP, this is what pastors, this is what doctors want to do. This is outreach. Correct?
Richardson: That is correct. Yes.
Kellams: This is part of your mission, even if you're not paid for it.
Richardson: Absolutely. Yeah. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is welcome. Because our community is only as healthy as its people.
Dr. MacBruce: That is true.
Richardson: That is. Yes. And we will not be able to survive or sustain our community for generations to come if we're not healthy collectively. And that's all of us. That's humankind.
Dr. MacBruce: One of the things is that we all have the same questions really, or somebody else has the question that you have. And so in a community forum like this, somebody is bound to have the questions that you're not even sure that you should ask or if that's the right question. And so we love the idea that this is a community event and it's not just an individual event because we strongly believe that one of the ways to get around this and to get on top of it is to be a community, to be each other. To be your brother's keeper. So I think coming out, and maybe even hearing somebody else ask a question can help you start thinking about what the process should look like for you and your family, and help you get the message across from just you as a person to your smaller community, to your brothers, your sisters, your cousins, uncles, aunties. And so the big thing is that this is a community event and it does promote that community thinking about this.
Dr. Roberts: And Kyle, there are a lot of other community-based organizations that are bridging the divide. I think of, and I want to promote organizations like the Good Samaritan that is already — for $35, you can go in and get a full physical, you can get all your care done. I want to be able to promote clinics like the clinic that Mercy provides that already is meeting the needs and subsidizing the cost for obstetric care, gynecological care. I want to promote the efforts of UAMS that is stepping up to send specialists to Fort Smith throughout clinical care and try to augment some of the cardiology service, sports medicine service. So there are things that are being done. We are privileged to the information because we work in health care, but our community members aren't privileged to that. So if we can even share that for them to know that there are options, I think that would also calm some of the anxiety that a lot of people feel and a lot of the despair from the news of Baptist divestment.
The town hall regarding navigating health care, supported by the NAACP Sebastian County branch, will be tomorrow night from 6 until 7 at Community Bible North on Rogers Avenue in Fort Smith. The conversation with Dr. Daphne MacBruce, Dr. Jessiela Roberts and Talicia Richardson took place yesterday afternoon via Zoom.
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