Mineral Community Hospital looks to the future

SUPERIOR – The new chief executive officer at Mineral Community Hospital may have only been on the job for a few months but he and the rest of the staff are already well into reshaping the facility on numerous fronts.

Ron Gleason came to the position in November with experience in revitalizing the financial viability of facilities like the one in Mineral County and he is already busy putting those skills to work. While the past financial woes of MCH are well known, Gleason is putting those issues behind them and looking to the future. He said part of the process of recovering involves restructuring how the hospital conducts the business side of operations.

“We are trying to recover from some of the decisions of the past,” Gleason said. “We are starting to collect some old receivables. We collected about $600,000 in December. We are doing better but we still have a long way to go. We’re working on it.”

Gleason said the efforts to rehabilitate MCH do not stop at dealing with financial issues. He said one of his primary concerns is to reestablish the facility’s reputation within the community and one of the ways to do that, according to Gleason, is to alter the hospital from within.

“We are working on some culture change within our facility,” Gleason said. “We are implementing some processes that we hope people will recognize. We want people to be welcome here and know that we are here to help them. By making some changes in how we treat each other and how we treat the community, we hope people will recognize those changes.”

The changes Gleason alluded to include making promises among the staff to improve operations, holding themselves accountable to those promises, taking responsibility for actions and exhibiting a positive perspective toward caring for members of the community. Gleason said the staff at MCH has been extremely receptive to the changes in the internal culture of the facility.

“It’s been amazing to watch the acceptance of the people here in Superior,” Gleason said. “We have great people here. Hopefully that will make a difference. We want to be consistent with how we treat people when they come to our facility. We want to acknowledge that they are the reason we are here. We need to be there to make them comfortable. The last part is, we need to be thankful. We need to be thanking people when they come to our facility. They need to know we appreciate them. Everyone in the organization is getting that training.”

Gleason said the facility would also be trying to arrange for more specialists at MCH to provide enhanced health care options to patients in the future.