Keokuk County Hospital Trustee candidates sound off
Cheryl Monroe
Jerlyn Bowers
Jim Eschenbrenner
By:
Charlie Comfort
Publisher
The questions the candidates were given:
1. What is your background?
2. What motivates you to seek election to the Trustees?
3. What is the role of the hospital board of trustees?
4. What’s the biggest issue facing KCHC and how do we fix it?
5. How has KCHC improved since you came onto the board?
6. How do you believe KCHC has responded to the COVID-19 Pandemic?
7. Why should voters vote for you?
8. Anything else you want to say?
Cheryl Monroe
1. I’ve been on the hospital Board of Trustees for over 20 years. I’ve learned so much
in that time.
2. I feel it’s so important to keep this hospital and clinic going for this county. And I
want to do whatever I can to do that.
3. We are the governing body of the hospital. We hire the CEO and make sure he
does an effective job. And we make sure the hospital is providing quality care. We
oversee the financial reports and we represent Keokuk County.
4. Right now one of our biggest issue is our reimbursement from Medicaid under
managed care. We are trying to work that through legislation. Another issue right
now are repercussions from COVID-19. It has affected many hospitals. Hopefully we
will have a vaccine in the near future.
5. There’s been major changes since I first got on the board. We were still in the old
hospital. We built the new facility in 2007. We’ve added many speciality services,
the medical clinic, more Doctors, Physician Assistants & Nurse practitioners. We
have a great Physical Therapy service and we bought the pharmacy in Brothers
Market. We’ve tried as a board to make medical services easier to access in this
county and the surrounding area.
6. ALL the employees have done a GREAT job dealing with the pandemic. They
would have daily briefings and have kept their safety and the safety of our patients
and the community safe. I am VERY proud of all our staff.
7. I am first and foremost a Mom, Grandma and a lifelong Sigourney resident. I have
had over 20 years of experience on the board at KCHC. And most importantly, I care
about the people in this community, and I listen to their concerns and do my best to
address them.
Jerlyn Bowers
1. I have been a resident of Keokuk County for my entire life. I graduated from
Sigourney High School in 1974. After graduation I began working at the Manor
House Nursing Home as a Certified Nurse’s Aide. In 1978, I then began working at
the Keokuk County Health Center, also as a certified nurse’s aide. Through my
experience working at both facilities I developed a strong love of caring for the
patients. It was then that I realized I had a desire to further my education and to
become a registered nurse. I began the nursing program at Indian Hills Community
College in 1985. In May of 1987 I graduated from Indian Hills Community College
with an Associate Degree in Nursing. As a registered nurse I was employed in 1987
at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City. I worked fulltime as a staff nurse on the
Medical/Surgical floor. After a year of gaining experience at Mercy Hospital, I
returned in 1988 to Keokuk County Health Center to continue my career as a staff
nurse. In 1996 I was offered and accepted the position of Infection Control Nurse as
well as the Social Service/Discharge Planner for KCHC. In 2001, I became the
Director of Nurses at Keokuk County Health Center. I remained in the Director of
Nurses position until my retirement in 2011. I have also been employed by Keokuk
County as a Medical Examiner Investigator. I began this facet of my career in 2006
and continue to work currently for the county in this position. I received
certification as a Medicolegal Death Investigator at the St. Louis University School of
Medicine. Through St. Louis University School of Medicine I have completed both
basic and master’s courses in death investigation. I am also an active member of the
Iowa Association of County Medical Examiners. I currently hold position on the
Keokuk County Public Health Board, and have previously held position on the
Keokuk County Crisis Intervention Board as well as Hospice of Keokuk County.
As previously stated, I have resided in Keokuk County my whole life. My late
husband John Bowers and I lived in Sigourney our entire married life. Here we have
raised 2 daughters, Brandy Stangl and Brooke Garringer, who both reside in
Sigourney with our grandchildren, Patrick John (PJ) Stangl, Noel Garringer, Halle
Garringer, and Grace Garringer. I am a member of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in
Sigourney.
2. I am very motivated to serve as a member on the KCHC board of trustees. I know
that my many years of dedicated employment for the Keokuk County Health Center
would serve as an asset to the board. I also know that my years of medical training
and experience, my drive for quality patient care and ethical treatment, and my deep
roots within this county will be beneficial in my role on the board of trustees. I truly
have a special place in my heart for the Keokuk County Health Center and a desire to
continue to help it thrive and succeed. If the people of Keokuk County could entrust
me to hold position on our county hospital board, I can assure you I would put to
work my extensive knowledge of the hospital itself as well as my love for the
Keokuk County Health Center.
3. The role of the hospital board of trustees is to ensure the health center operations
are functioning at their highest level of quality possible. This includes not only the
facilities, but the physicians, nurses, and all other employees. The board of trustees’
supervision helps to ensure the commitment of KCHC in providing quality and
compassionate care to our community.
4. One of the problems facing a medical facility, especially in a small rural hospital
like ours, is the struggle to ensure that we are providing our patients with quality
care even though we face issues such as Medicare and Medicaid financial cuts. As a
board member it is important that we work hard to balance a budget and to work
with government entities to provide solid financial support and decisions.
5. Keokuk County Health Center continues to respond as expected to the COVID-19
Pandemic by following the recommendations put forth by the Center for Disease
Control.
6. I encourage the citizens of Keokuk County to vote for my election to the KCHC
board of trustees for several reasons. I have over 30 years of direct experience
working at the hospital itself. I have over 40 years of medical experience working in
the healthcare field. This experience is important to help understand the daily
operations of the hospital, as well as the choices that need to be made to ensure the
longevity and success of the facility. I have a deep rooted dedication to the Keokuk
County Health Center as an essential component of our community and the people it
serves.
Jim Eschenbrenner
1. We moved to Keokuk County in 1993 when I became the pastor at Union Chapel
Church, which was located on the Delta/Fremont cutoff road. We served there for
11 years and during that time all three of our children graduated from Pekin High
School. From 2004 to 2013 I served a group of 93 churches as their Executive Pastor
and although I travelled the Midwest we made our home in Hedrick. My wife of 34
years died in 2009 from Colon Cancer. I now live in a small farm house just South of
Delta and serve as the Lead Pastor at Northgate Church in Ottumwa. I enjoy serving
the community and have helped with Speech and Performing Arts at Pekin for 27
consecutive years and recently had a grandson in a production! Being a County
Hospital Trustee is both a privilege and a serious responsibility. We determine both
the short-term and long-term mission, manage a complex budget, set policies and
procedures, and hold the CEO/Administrator accountable for how the hospital
performs. The Trustees work as a team – although that doesn’t mean we always all
agree! I look forward to our meetings and working with our great staff. I have
served as a trustee for 10 years and have been President for eight years.
2. I think the thing that is most challenging, in the good way of challenging, is that
we face some unprecedented times, both from the changes in how the medical
system is working in our country and through the whole COVID pandemic
experience. The hospital, and health care in general, has to learn to pivot a whole lot
faster than we've pivoted in the past. Flexibility is going to determine our longevity.
It's really clear that if we don't learn how to do that, the future of health care,
especially in small communities, is that risk.
3. Reimbursement for Medicaid and Medicare Services. The way that the ACA was
set up is they inserted an entire new level of, middle management that now has to
process all of our claims, question all our coding and basically force us to spend way
more time and effort trying to get reimbursed for the services we do provide. Our
CEO, and our board as a group, we spend a lot of time on legislative issues, trying to
stay in contact, especially with our state legislators, because these are important
things that we need people to help influence how those reimbursements are
processed and how those take place.
4. KCHC is, from the very beginning, been very prepared for this kind of an event.
We're very fortunate to work closely with the county disaster preparedness team
and the crisis people in our county, the sheriff's department, and the local police
department. All those services communicate well with each other, and Casey
Thompson is on our hospital staff, he’s our, Director of Operations, and he does a
great job at making sure that all that communication is taking place. So, I would say
that our little hospital, even though we're a rural hospital, we've been very prepared
to tackle this thing in our are even better prepared today. The policy and procedures
we put in place immediately when this happened, we were able to do this with the
bare minimum impact on our staff. I'm not pretending they weren't impacted. They
were, but it was the minimum impact, and I think everybody ought to be really,
really pleased that that our hospital and our clinic, were able to navigate these
uncharted waters. Even though even though people made some sacrifices, they did
that with an eye on the future knowing that a sacrifice now meant we were going to
be around in the years to come.
5. Board of Trustees is quite well defined by the rules and regulations of the hospital
world in our state. That is we set policy. We issue credentials to people that are
certified and able to perform their duties. We manage the budget. We manage the
staff, which we do through our CEO, through our administrator, Matt Ives. Those are
the priorities of our Board of Trustees. A lot of people get confused about this. They
they'd like to come to us and say, “Hey, you know, so and so really deserves a raise”,
and our response is, “you know, it's wonderful that you believe that. Please let their
supervisor know. You're welcome to contact Matt Ives directly but as a board we
don't get involved in in that.” You know, somebody comes to us and says, hey, I think
you need to change a sign or put up a light or paint an arrow in the parking lot,
whatever it is, and those are not the details that we deal with. We have to discipline
ourselves to be involved in the big picture items because number one, we trust our
staff, and number two, no Board of Trustees ought to do day to day, item by item
management of things.
6. I think the primary reason why I ought to serve another term is because I have 10
years of experience that I bring to the table. One of the things that that happens with
a new board member are they have to learn a new culture. They have to learn a new
set of terminology. They have to begin to grasp the concepts of “okay, we're not
going to do day to day management things. We're going to be big picture people.”
Just getting used to how a budget is run, that is both county funded from property
tax, as well as funded from private insurance to Medicaid to Medicare and all the
different steps in between, just learning how all that functions takes a significant
amount of time. I believe that somebody has to be on the board a minimum six years
just to get up to speed so that they're able to, to comprehend the decisions that are
they’re being asked to make.
7. Serving on the Hospital Board of Trustees is a privilege for me. There are no
rewards from doing this, expect for the fact that there’s an enormous sense
satisfaction when I walk in the doors of the clinic in the hospital, of knowing that
this place is really well run. We have a great staff. We're providing wonderful
services for our community, and there's a sense of satisfaction that comes from
knowing that we have that level of care. The other the other thing I would say is, I
think the Keokuk County hospital is like the hidden gem in Keokuk County. I don't
think a lot of people know that we have everything from mental health services to
dermatology clinics to a fantastic physical therapy department. They can get the
kind of care at the hospital and staff in Sigourney that they would get in many large
places, but they're going to go in and they're going to find people who know them by
name, and who knows their neighbors, and went to school with their kids. I think
that's a level of personal service that makes KCHC unique.
Category:
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