Letters to the editor and other opinion pieces submitted to SweetwaterNOW.com do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the company or management.
I did enjoy my time on the hospital board, which was woefully short, perhaps about two years.
I found the hospital and health care in Sweetwater County to have changed drastically in the five years since my retirement and ALL for the better.
There is a whole different culture at the hospital with a whole cadre of employed physicians who are concerned about improving patient care and patient experience and without the business competition of solo practice, they are working together.
The Emergency Room, always a generator of complaints because of its “emergency” focus in working to reduce waits, both on arrival and during the evaluation process.
We have a wonderful cadre of new services: pulmonary medicine, radiation therapy, a new cancer center (with Huntsman Cancer Center of Salt Lake affiliation), oral surgery, cardiac care. The hospital has been recognized as excellent in our zone of “frontier care” and we have landed affiliations with the University of Utah Medical Center, the Huntsman Cancer Center and the Shriners’ Hospital in SLC.
We have new physicians providing Occupational Medicine services to Tata Chemicals and to Solvay with several others in the offing.
MHSC is now providing care to residents of Wansutter and Farson-Big Sandy Clinic in their localities.
Our hospital CEO, Gerald Kline, has been a wizard at seeing the future, building a capable team and aligning us to be part of a larger system; he has been able to build a team of very capable VP’s who “make it happen!” I don’t claim any of this is my doing but it’s a different Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County than when I was practicing and we ought to be proud and supportive.
My only regret is that I will not be a part of this emerging success.
Thomas Spicer
