Eye to the future
MCSA takes steps closer to reaching ‘Destination Health care’ vision
For the past two years, the Medical Center of South Arkansas has focused on making its services and medicine more accessible to the region. In May 2019, MCSA CEO Scott Street spoke at an El Dorado City Council meeting about improvements and expansions the hospital wanted to make to improve its quality of care.
During the meeting, Street discussed opening Lester Street to allow easier access and a smoother ride to the hospital for ambulances and the patients they carry, recruitment for physicians in subspecialities, building a full-service cancer treatment center, the return of a residency program, mental health services and an on-site medical helicopter.
During the annual Healthy Heart, Healthy You luncheon in February this year, which was hosted by MCSA and the Healthy Woman Board to discuss information about heart disease and encourage action, Street announced advancements in all of those areas.
At the time, Street said the hospital was gearing up for a ribbon cutting for the hospital’s alliance with Survival Flight, envisioning groundbreaking on the new cancer center at the end of May and reinstating the University of Arkansas residency program.
Now, many of those improvements and expansions under Street’s “Destination Health care,” the vision for the hospital, have come to fruition as they’re more “tangible,” as Street says, while the others are gaining traction but won’t be apparent to the public until the somewhat near future.
“Health care is one of the most dynamic, ever-changing fields there is, especially when you work in it, it changes daily,” Street said.
Over the past year, the hospital, with the help of the county and city, opened up Lester Street, and although it provides better access, Street said the hospital isn’t proud of it quite yet because there’s still some cleanup to do.
He also said the hospital is also trying to clean up Grove, Union and Fifth Street from North West to College avenues.
“Priority one is the ambulances coming to us with patients, and to come on Fifth Street is so inappropriate for those patients to be in the back of an ambulance and bounced all over the place, literally,” Street said. “Lester Street is a much smoother entrance to us, to the ER, so that was priority one.”
In another tangible vein, MCSA’s alliance with Survival Flight, an emergency medical air transportation company, started Feb. 28.
The hospital hosts crew quarters and a heli-pad for the company, and Survival Flight has the name of the hospital on its helicopter.
“It’s made a difference for sure,” JD Windham, El Dorado base manager for Survival Flight and flight nurse, said in a March 17 News-Times report.
The crew is made up of a pilot, registered nurse and a paramedic, although there are four pilots and eight-full time medical staffers that rotate for shifts. The helicopter has a 400 mile radius and flies 130-140 mph in a straight line, and responds to emergency and patient transportation calls.
Although the hospital’s name is on the helicopter, Survival Flight will fly patients from emergency scenes wherever they need to go, whether it’s MCSA or not.
“It’s just been a great partnership,” Street said. “They fit our culture and our vision for what we’re trying to accomplish in South Arkansas.”
However, that isn’t the only alliance MCSA has made in the past couple years. The hospital has expanded its services in partnership with the Arkansas Children’s Hospital’s Nursery Alliance to make in-home neonatal care possible.
The Family Connects program, which allows a registered nurse to visit and checkup on newborns and their mothers, began in September 2019 with training in April the same year.
The free and voluntary program hit its 100th visit earlier this month, according to a previous News-Times report. Nurses in the program ask the mother if they would like
“There’s got to be a really robust outpatient piece to behavioral health along with what we already have in place in the medical withdrawal, but there’s got to be that counseling that occurs or there’ll be this cycle right back in. It’s just an ugly cycle across the country right now — not just in El Dorado or Arkansas, it’s a crisis in America.”
— Scott Street, CEO Medical Center of South Arkansas