Caring About Care
Health care reform is still up for debate in Congress, but it's already
underway in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. Virginia Kingsley Jones '39, who has worked
at Boothbay Harbor's St. Andrews Hospital both in paid and volunteer capacities
for more than 50 years and headed the hospital's recently concluded $160,000
annual fund-raising campaign, says St. Andrews already has transformed health
care in the region.
Despite being the largest employer in what Jones calls "this town down here on
the peninsula," St. Andrews has only 22 acute care units and a 30-bed nursing
home and no trauma or transplant facilities. The hospital has lost some doctors
to larger establishments and higher salaries and has found it increasingly hard
to reach people.
"So we've gone beyond `hospital' to `health care.' Health care means working
with schools and the YMCA or having clinics like our blood pressure clinics,"
said Jones, who began at St. Andrews in 1941 after receiving her medical
technology degree at the Central Maine General Hospital School of Medical
Technology. She has served as chief medical technologist and as president of
the hospital auxiliary and currently is secretary of the hospital's board of
trustees. As the only member of the hospital personnel on the board, she says
she brings "a different perspective toward employees."
St. Andrews features three family practice doctors and two interns in a group
practice, which Jones says she has been advocating for years. "They're all
employees of the hospital. Before, they were in competition, now they're
working together," she said. "It's working."
Preventive health care is just around the corner, says Jones, who sounds as
savvy as a hospital administrator after her stints on the hospital's executive,
strategic planning and human resources committees. While the hospital still
offers such services as x-rays and physicals and draws blood for blood work, it
has established family clinic branches, one 15 miles away in Edgecomb and the
other, a women's health center, in Boothbay Harbor. Both are serviced by the
hospital's five physicians.
"Preventive health is the coming thing," Jones said. "You're going to try to
keep them out of the hospital rather than in."
To be in a stronger position to deal with insurance companies, who, she says,
increasingly want a facility to serve a base number of clients, St. Andrews is
investigating networking services such as sharing physicians and laboratory
testing with as many as nine other hospitals.
"You'll only get so much money to take care of John Doe. When it's used up,
that's it. Health care is going to be a different thing," she said.
St. Andrews, which was built as an in-patient building, already is functioning
as an out-patient facility, Jones says. One related result is home health care,
another front-line St Andrews service.
"Medicare won't pay for people to stay in hospitals so we have to send them
home, but they aren't always able to take care of themselves--so they need home
health care," said Jones. "We are it."
In a community with many retirees, the hospital also is doing a feasibility
study to see how much interest exists in seniors' housing. "We need something
for the whole spectrum," she said. "This is a business. Today, you have to get
into these outreach things or you can't survive."
The board also set up an advisory committee so that people with complaints or
suggestions can call regarding services.
"We're trying very hard to meet all the needs of the community," she said.
Her position as head of the recent fund-raising drive was "only titular,"
claims Jones, a Boothbay resident since 1941. "But everybody knows me. They
wanted somebody local and on the board who's respected in the community. I'm
called on for how local people feel."
During 10 years away from the hospital to raise her daughter, Jones did
clerical work at the Hodgton Brothers shipyard. When the yard was sold, she
worked in the office of a local shrimp company for a year, then, armed with her
Colby chemistry major and biology courses, was employed by the government as a
biologist at a local research lab studying lobsters and herring. She returned
to the hospital in 1970, where she remained until she retired in 1984, a year
before her husband died.
Retirement seems a misnomer. In her 70s--and now a great-grandmother
twice--she joined a tap dancing group at the YMCA. (She drew the line at public
performance, she said, "but if they'd offer the old soft shoe, I'd do it
again.") She also has served the College as a class agent and currently is in
the middle of a three-year term as a 50-plus representative to the Alumni
Council. But it's the hospital that claims the bulk of her attention. "It's
been the biggest interest in my life," she said.
"Except they don't pay me any more," she joked, then added, "It's nerve
wracking. But financially we're better now and have more patients."
"We can now look to expand," she said, already anticipating a St. Andrews
capital campaign, perhaps for seniors' housing, a couple of years down the
road.
Mules on the Move/Table of Contents/The Fifty Plus Class Notes