Monadnock Community Hospital held its annual Legislative Breakfast at the hospital Friday morning. Strengthening laws to protect health care workers from violence in the work place as well as the potential collaboration with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health was discussed.
As a rural hospital, MCH struggles to fill job openings, MCH president and CEO Cyndee McGuire told legislators.
“We’ve trained some of our own nurses who have gone on to become nurse practitioners,” she said.
But it’s not just nurse practitioners and primary care physicians, it’s medical assistants, lab technicians and radiology technicians that are needed, she said.
“Often times, we have to hire temporary workers that cost us a lot more,” McGuire said. “Currently we have approximately 40 open positions here at MCH. We run between 30 and 40 most of the time.”
As a member of GraniteOne Health, MCH is close to joining a collaboration with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health which would increase opportunities for MCH to access training, resources and staff from other hospitals in the collaborative, McGuire said.
“We have filed a change of control document with the state,” she said.
The partnership would aid MCH with workforce shortages, physician recruitment, tele-medicine and behavioral health services. Staying financially viable is a challenge for all rural hospitals, she said.
“We are very fortunate, I think, that our board has recognized a need to be negotiating our path forward from a position of financial strength,” McGuire said. “Many of our colleagues in rural hospitals are struggling financially.”
In the past 10 years more than 120 small rural hospitals have closed, she said.
Steve Ahnen, president of the New Hampshire Hospital Association, said his association follows about 100 bills every legislative season. Ahnen said the association is currently working with legislators to create a commission to study workplace in healthcare.
“This is an issue that we’ve been hearing about for many, many years and it’s really one that challenges us. How do we solve this issue? And why is it when healthcare workers come to do their job every day the likely-hood that they will be harmed, that they will be the subject of some form of violence whether it’s physical violence, or threatening, why is that OK? The answer is it’s not. And how do we solve that?”