Hutchens affirms board approval to transfer Day Trust

DAYTON–The Columbia County Health System board (CCHS) were informed of the Five-Year Strategic Plan–approving the transfer of the Day Trust; the revenue bottom line; and refining the vision; mission and values of the hospital, voting to approve.

McGuire spoke about the Five-Year Strategic Plan and said the previous version was problematic because it didn't apply to all levels of the organization. The revised plan presents measurable goals for each department to be followed up on regularly. A plan was reviewed by the Board six months ago, and was again given to them to review because of some updates. It will be adopted at the next board meeting on December 15. During that meeting, Hutchens said the Board will also be officially approving the transfer of the Day Trust from the current holder Bank of America to the Blue Mountain Community Foundation. Doing this is the only way the Health District will keep the farm and land, said Hutchens.

Chief Financial Officer Matt Minor provided the October financial statement with a bottom line of $464,000 in revenue at the November Board meeting for Columbia County Health System held on December 1. Of note, acute patient care days in October were 49 which was about double what they were last year. Acute swing bed patient days were 52 over the previous month at 205. Also, respiratory therapy procedures continue to trend high in numbers at 286 and Wound Care and Hyperbaric were up to 525 over 319 procedures the prior month.

CEO Shane McGuire spent some time explaining to the board the need for a refining the vision, mission and values. He has been meeting with staff and Board Director Bob Hutchens about this. He said, "I was here in 2010 when Charlie Button created the vision, mission and values. The Organization has changed quite substantially since 2010 and we've done a lot of work with the team here–the executive team, with team concepts...a lot of culture work. That has sort of led to a redefining of vision, mission and values."

McGuire put before the Board what he and his teams recommends based around staff input about the concepts "We are one" and other "words that represented value statements to them," and asked them to consider approving it before the end of the year. McGuire continued, "One of the things that I did when I was walking around this year, I was asking people about our mission statement, and almost nobody could tell me what it was. Sometimes they would look around for something on a wall, and it's tough to remember and the mission statement that we have been operating under, staff don't have ownership over it– they don't feel tied to it...we worked hard with a couple of groups of people, the executive team...and came up with a new mission statement and the goal was to keep it concise, short and not full of words so it was easy to remember and easy to relate to."

The Board voted and unanimously approved the changes.