Northern Arizona Healthcare Vice President of Construction and Development Steve Eiss discussed NAH’s master plan for the Verde Valley at Yavapai College as part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Brown Bag series on Sept. 26.
NAH has been working on the plan for the last six months. Eiss mentioned several possible expansions and improvements to services at the VVMC, but added that there is no timeline for any of those projects. He said that NAH plans to take community feedback on the master plan through the end of the year and publish the document sometime in the first quarter of 2024.
“When the master plan gets published, that doesn’t mean we start building beds or we start building an emergency department,” Eiss said. “It’s really the intention of — this is to understand what the needs are. So then we can start to prioritize them.”
“[Projects will] be prioritized based off our own internal data, and also what we hear from the community,” Eiss said. “Then there’s a separate approval process within the company from a capital perspective that they go through individually by project as opposed to as in one big master plan, and then we will start work accordingly.”
NAH’s goals for the Verde Valley Medical Center include updating the signage to improve people’s ability to navigate the property, improving vehicle access and eventual expansion of oncology services and administrative space. The VVMC currently has “enough beds … for the foreseeable future,” Eiss said but the plan will help identify where the next patient tower will go.
The Sedona campus will require the replacement of its linear accelerator for cancer treatment, improvements to the emergency department, which is currently at capacity, and layout improvements.
“Anecdotally, we’ve heard that people because of the wait times … in Cottonwood sometimes ended up down [in Sedona], which creates a backlog on this very small emergency department,” consultant Tracie Sorenson said.
Presentation documents also noted that NAH will “need to identify potential new location[s] due to flooring issues in current lease space” for Sedona EntireCare Rehab andSports Medicine.
Flagstaff Facility
Voters in Flagstaff will decide on Tuesday, Nov. 7, if they will keep the rezoning that the Flagstaff City Council approved forNAH’s plans to construct a new hospital in Flagstaff near the Fort Tuthill County Park. Council approved azone change earlier this year but a voter referendum is challenging it. NAH sued to prevent the referendum, arguing that those collecting petitions did not specify that the rezoning was for a hospital, but a county judge dismissed those claims, ruling that the language used in the petitions was lawful.
Verde Valley residents are concerned that the size and cost of the project in Flagstaff would draw resources away from the Verde Valley. Eiss argued that will not be the case.
“The work we’re doing in Flagstaff will support the Verde market,” Eiss said. “Because there are certain things that we do in Flagstaff that we don’t do in Verde, but it’s not intended to take away or change any services we provide in the Verde market.”
Staffing Levels
Staffing of health care professionals and the level of service has been an ongoing issue.
“Ultimately what we’ve been facing is as a result of the pandemic and postpandemic,” Eiss said. “There’s been a lot of turnover related to the ‘Great Resignation.’ That was not just for staff [in] nursing [because of] the trials and stresses of the pandemic … In many cases, a lot of providers were already well along in their career, the pandemic caused them to want to retire. In a market like the Verde Valley, which is very different than Phoenix, when you only have one or two of a particular specialty, because of population size, when you have provider turnover, it hurts more.”
NAH officials have stated that they have been actively recruiting health care positions in the area with limited success. One of the most often-cited examples is the reduction in the hours NAH’s catheterization lab is open. NAH is currently using contracted physicians to cover the lab, “which is not ideal, but obviously better than not having services,” NAH Medical Group President Pasquale Bernardi said. Bernardi said physician recruitment across the Verde Valley has been a priority and that there has been a net gain of seven primary care providers since he started in his position 15 months ago.
“We have [had] some success in general cardiology,” Bernardi said. “We have a physician joining us in December. We have another part-time general cardiologist that’s going to be in the Village of Oak Creek come December as well and we have a electrophysiology cardiologist who started six months ago getting up to speed there.”
Over the last 15 months, NAH’s Sedona facility has moved from using only contracted positions to two physicians and a nurse practitioner. NAH resumed breast imaging services on Aug. 2 after a temporary shutdown of that offering because of a staffing shortage with its contracted partner, Northern Arizona Radiology.
“We continue to recruit hard,” Bernardi said. “We just hired a senior provider recruiter last week, she starts next week. We’re adding other resources to our recruiting. We’re very aware that both primary and specialty care in the Verde Valley is vital to the health of the of the whole health system. The direction I get from [NAH CEO] Dave Cheney is to keep plugging away because we need we need more providers there and we need to be successful down there.”
What Eiss sees as the Verde Valley’s big need is increased oncology services.
“[As well as] some type of restructuring of our emergency department,” Eiss said. “Really just access and utilization of our emergency departments to try and decrease wait times for the community, and then continuing to increase access of care through recruitment and retention of nurses and Physicians.”
No dates are currently set for future NAH public outreach presentations on the Verde Valley Master Plan. Until future dates are announced, comments can be submitted under the Contact Us tab at nahealth.com.
