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| Name |
Magic Valley Reg Medical Ctr |
| Address |
650 Addison Avenue West |
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P.O. Box 409 |
| Town |
Twin Falls |
| State |
Idaho |
| Country |
USA |
| Post Code |
83303 |
| Phone |
208 737 2000 |
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| Email |
| Website |
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Specialization Of Magic Valley Reg Medical Ctr
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Obestetrician/Gynecologist |
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About Magic Valley Reg Medical Ctr
** Our Mission, Vision,and Values **
For more than a century, St. Luke’s has carried on the work first envisioned by Bishop Funsten. Our original purpose has remained, and our heritage and values direct our course as we continue to meet the area’s rapidly growing needs. Our mission, “To improve the health of people in our region,” is the foundation upon which we have built Idaho’s largest and most advanced health care organization.
In keeping with our not-for-profit mission, St. Luke’s maintains an open-door policy, which means we care for all patients, regardless of their ability to pay. Thousands of people with no or inadequate health care coverage receive free services each year at St. Luke’s.
Additionally, St. Luke’s endeavors to provide cost-effective, convenient access to health care for the underinsured, Medicaid, and Medicare populations. Our efforts are supported by generous gifts from area benefactors, whose donations help assure both the availability and the advancement of health care for our region. To find out how you can help, contact St. Luke’s Magic Valley Health Foundation.
St. Luke’s Health System Mission
To improve the health of people in our region.
St. Luke's Health System Vision
St. Luke's Health System will transform health care by aligning with physicians and other providers to deliver integrated, seamless, and patient-centered quality care across all St. Luke's settings.
St.Luke’s Health System Values
Integrity
Compassion
Accountability
Respect
Excellence
St. Luke's Magic Valley Vision
Within St. Luke’s Health System, each hospital is unique, with its own distinct vision created and inspired by those who best understand the communities they serve. At St. Luke's Magic Valley our vision is:
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History Of Magic Valley Reg Medical Ctr
** The History of St. Luke's Magic Valley Medical Center **
** Coming of age **
Although the years between 1918 and 2003 are a small portion of human history, the distance between those two years in medical treatment and health care technologies is immense. Cataclysms of change have rocked the health sciences, along with the rest of American society, during those eight decades.
It is difficult to imagine the primitive plumbing, the sod floors and the horse-drawn transportation that most folks relied on early in this century. And it is almost impossible to comprehend how infections were treated before antibiotics and surgeries performed without modern anesthetics. Bloodletting and the purging of liquids from the body to the point of dangerous dehydration were still common practices back then and even the importance of washing hands between patients was not yet recognized.
In 1918, the "war to end all wars" was grinding down to an exhausted armistice. A worldwide influenza epidemic that would eventually kill 22 million people was spreading. Woodrow Wilson was president and the U.S. population topped 100 million.
Twin Falls, only 13 years past its founding date, was bustling with new construction and a growing population.
The census of 1910 recorded 13,543 residents in Twin Falls County; by 1920, the population more than doubled to 28,398, the difference made up largely of homesteaders lured by new irrigation projects.
Against this backdrop, the Twin Falls County Hospital was created. The first publicly-owned hospital in the area, it not only grew to meet the needs of its constituency, but it would come to reflect the openness, self-reliance and conservatism of the general population. While other small county hospitals would open and close in other areas of the nation, this one would endure the hard times, adapt to change and thrive.
As Twin Falls County grew, the need for public services, utilities and medical care followed. A typhoid epidemic caused by tainted drinking water broke out among settlers in Rock Creek Canyon in 1905. A few physicians took patients into their homes, as was common in that day, but typhoid patients required 24-hour care and long-term convalescence. A makeshift hospital was set up in a saloon on Second Avenue South in Twin Falls and two nurses were hired to care for the afflicted, but the motivation was already in place for construction of a formal hospital.
** Private Limitations, Public Benefits **
Prior to World War I, hospitals were not the institutions of primary and specialized medical treatment that they are today. Anyone with sufficient financial resources was doctored and nursed at home. Hospitals were for the indigent or the terminally ill; like county farms and county homes, they admitted far more wards than they discharged.
The opening of the Twin Falls County Hospital coincided with the end of the war and changes in the public's perception of hospitals. An unexpected byproduct of the war was much improved medical care. Lessons learned in field hospitals along the front lines were taken to heart back at home. New technologies like x-ray machines, clinical laboratories and antiseptic surgery were saving lives, but few private physicians could afford the expense or the space to accommodate them. Hospitals became the repositories and primary staging ground for this new era in medicine.
Many early attempts were made to construct and maintain a private hospital in Twin Falls County. All were handicapped by the area's relatively sparse population and moderate income.
Dr. Truman Boyd operated short-lived hospitals on Second Street (a few blocks from the saloon-hospital) and in the Boyd Building on Main Avenue in 1905, and later took controlling interest in the 65-room Twin Falls Hospital, which was constructed in 1906 with public contributions.
The Twin Falls Hospital, which became known as "Boyd Hospital," survived until Dr. Boyd retired in 1921 and sold the facility to the Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph. The religious order operated the facility as LaMerced Hospital for less than a year before it failed and was converted into the Park Hotel.
Other attempts at private hospital care were opened in homes on 4th Avenue East in 1909, 9th Avenue East in 1910 and 3rd Avenue North in 1914. None lasted much more than a year. The Physicians and Surgeons Hospital, founded by a Dr. John Morgan, opened with 16 beds and two full-time nurses in 1914, but by 1918 it too was in trouble.
Although there was opposition to the idea of a public hospital in Twin Falls County -- most notably from Dr. Boyd and the Boyd Hospital -- by 1915 the need for one was fairly clear. Private hospitals were not stable enough to provide reliable health care for the growing community and a county facility was needed to care for its indigents. Rural doctors would benefit, certainly, by having a central location to board and treat their most serious patients. The public would benefit, as well, from better overall care and the lower costs of non-profit hospitalizations.
In a 1916 resolution declaring a "public necessity" for construction of the hospital and calling for bids, the Twin Falls County Commissioners (E.O. Carlson, T.E. Moore, D.P. Albee) made these findings.
"Twin Falls County is without adequate means in caring for the indigent, sick and otherwise unfortunate and... owing to the temporary arrangements of the present and past, there is a present necessity for a permanent arrangement for the care of such sick and unfortunate and... A great public benefit would be derived by the erection of a County Hospital."
By 1917, the Commissioners had levied $29,574 for construction of a two-story, 36-bed hospital on property the county had purchased two years earlier on Addison Avenue West. Concerned that it be self-sustaining, the commissioners allocated as much space as possible to paying patients while still serving the county's indigents.
Scheduled to open July 1, 1918, the formal dedication of Twin Falls County Hospital was delayed by a staff revolt. The newly hired superintendent of the hospital, Nancy Shaw, had a disagreement with the hospital janitor that led to a walkout of all 16 employees.
The hospital's six-member Board of Trustees endured a tumultuous first year. It demanded the resignation of Ms. Shaw, hired a temporary superintendent, re-hired the walkouts, appointed a new superintendent and then watched her resign a few months later after several physicians accused her of being "tactless and discourteous."
The hospital, meanwhile, had quickly filled to capacity and was losing money. Most of the rooms were being used by nurses and county wards instead of paying patients. And so, no sooner had the Twin Falls County Hospital opened than plans were being drafted for an addition. A nurse's home, constructed immediately to the west of the hospital, opened in 1920.
With most nurses temporarily housed elsewhere, the hospital began to turn a profit. By the end of the first year a total of 689 patients had been admitted, including 131 during an influenza epidemic that killed 14 patients. There were 39 births in the hospital that first year and 37 deaths. Receipts exceeded expenses by $1,858.50.
** A Place Apart **
Despite its proximity to the Twin Falls city center, the Twin Falls County Hospital was always a rural hospital, serving as many or more folks from outlying farms and ranches as it did patients from town. And not only was it rural , but it was remote. Its nearest neighboring hospitals in Burley, Hailey and Wendell all had 30 beds or less and one had to travel hundreds of miles to Salt Lake City, Spokane or Portland to find a true metropolitan hospital with a full contingent of specialists.
On average, rural folk use hospitals half as often as city dwellers. Consequently, Twin Falls County Hospital was conservatively designed to care for just 36 patients. Some questioned whether it needed that many, but within months of opening it was often full and by the 1940s more than 80 patients were being squeezed into wards, hallways and corridors. What the planners did not count on was the growth of population in the Magic Valley and how central this hospital would become, both geographically and medically, to residents of the region.
The changes were incremental, but steady. In 1927, the Twin Falls County Hospital admitted 1,350 patients and its maternity ward saw 151 births. Just two years later, admissions had increased 17 percent and the number of births was up 20 percent. The physical size of the hospital, meanwhile, remained the same.
Because southern Idaho was "off the beaten path" in the medical profession, the hospital and its staff had to be more self-reliant and creative in meeting their patients' needs. During an infectious meningitis epidemic in the late 1920s that required family quarantines, three nurses -- Helen Wolfe, Anastacia Wilson and Elizabeth Smith -- got together in the basement of the hospital and formed the first cooperative public health unit in the county. It operated for five years and was later part of the Crippled Children's Clinic in Idaho.
There was always more work than manpower, particularly as demands on the hospital increased, and the formation of the first Hospital Guild of Twin Falls County Hospital in 1949 was a god-send. Committed volunteers, both men and women, helped hold the over-crowded hospital together until Magic Valley Memorial Hospital was opened in 1952 and have been an integral part of its operation ever since.
new hospital was deemed unlikely in the 1940s, despite the worsening situation at Twin Falls County Hospital. A committee of concerned physicians -- Drs. Wayne Schow, William Peterson and Fred Kolouch -- prepared a damning report in 1943 that revealed an acute need for more beds, unhygienic overcrowding in the wards and dangerously limited space for emergency patients.
"It is impossible to segregate patients according to category of treatment, to age or even at times to sex," the committee reported. "The pneumonia patient adjacent to the surgical case in the ward is dangerous. The small impressionable child along the side of a terminal case is a bad situation. The preoperative patient is psychologically upset when adjacent to a dying patient.
"The indignities and mental trauma heaped on the hall patient are terrible. They are improperly exposed while being examined. The use of a bed pan or urinal by the hall patient must be an embarrassing experience... A grieving family certainly doesn't enjoy an audience."
A year later, the Twin Falls County Planning Board commissioned a Dr. Benjamin Black of Oakland, California, to make an impartial assessment of the hospital and its options. "The wards and other rooms for patients are entirely too crowded," he told the Board. "I saw children in the same ward and in adjoining beds with adults; medical and surgical cases were found on the same floor and perhaps in the same rooms."
Dr. Black also reported inadequate office space for the staff, including the superintendents, and a lack of storage for supplies and equipment. The heating plant was "badly designed," in his opinion, and the maternity ward was unprepared for sick babies. He told the board that 60 additional beds were needed, perhaps in wings built on to the old hospital, along with a new powerhouse and physical plant.
Considering its options, the Hospital Board looked into converting the nurse's home to ward space, using the county farm to house patients, or even erecting a metal Quonset hut not unlike today's potato storage buildings to serve as a ward. By 1946, the need for an entirely new facility capable of housing more patients and modern medical equipment was unquestioned and a $1.25 million bond issue was passed.
Together with private donations and a $315,029 federal government grant through the Hill-Burton Act, the county commissioners thought they had the funds to construct the new hospital. But when bids came in, they were short. Rather than compromise their vision for the new hospital, the commissioners floated another bond in 1950, this time for an additional $300,000, and again the voters responded in favor.
** For the Common Good **
The opening of the new hospital, now called Magic Valley Memorial Hospital, was a gala event. A crowd of more than 500 gathered for the formal dedication of the $1.875 million brick and glass structure on September 2, 1951. Everyone could see that a new era in medicine had begun. The building was spacious and brilliantly illuminated, rising five stories into the sky. Tall windows graced each room with long sheets of natural light that sparkled on the brand-new stainless steel instruments and equipment.
R.P. Parry, a prominent Twin Falls attorney and former county planning board chairman, used his dedicatory address to mark the moment as the beginning rather than the end of a quest for good medical services in Magic Valley.
"We have dreamed of this hospital. We have worked for it. We have overcome obstacles unmeasured. We have endured delays unbelievable. But, finally, today, here and now, it is a concrete definite reality," Parry stated.
The hospital's new name, Magic Valley Memorial Hospital, was a memorial, Parry said, "to all those doctors and nurses who came to this new country of sagebrush and sandstorm and, even more importantly, stayed to see the task through."
The primary architect of the new hospital, Alan Fisher, described how the building was designed to be as self-sufficient as possible, owing to its geographic isolation.
"The design of and requirements of all direct patient services are perhaps more generous and complete than is often required by a unit of this size. All pathological work is performed within. The radiographic and X-ray therapy department carries a heavy schedule. Urological work is carried on here along with a high elective surgical and orthopedic schedule. The relative birth rate is high, possible due to the apparent economic serenity."
Fisher, who lived in Denver, waxed poetic on the magnificence of the Snake River Canyon and the warmth of the community perched on its rim. "The opening of the hospital will leave wistful memories of many smoky, intense session in the ugly old dining room of the building about to be put out to pasture," he said. "Or there will come warm nostalgic thoughts of less intense moments, walking past the Lombardys in the lush bottom of the canyon or sitting there in the canyon under a blossoming apple tree and an April sky contemplating a beautiful T-bone steak with my friends."
Fisher's friends included a newly created Hospital Board, appointed by the County Commissioners in 1946 with greatly expanded authority and responsibilities authorized by the Idaho Legislature. The hospital superintendent of that period, J. Clifford McGilvray, described the development in a 1951 article for The Modern Hospital:
"The same group of citizens who were instrumental in promoting the construction of the new hospital, alarmed at the apparent lack of control in the old hospital, sponsored a bill for the creation of a hospital board; the bill was rapidly passed by the legislature. It is one of the most comprehensive laws for the control of hospitals that I have ever seen. It states specifically that no member of the medical profession shall be a member of the hospital board and limits board membership to a maximum of 15 who are to be roughly divided in their political affiliations though they must not hold any political office while serving on the board. The law states that board members should, as far as possible, represent the several communities of Twin Falls County."
Whereas the Twin Falls County Hospital's first Board of Trustees was largely an advisory group reporting directly to the County Commissioners, the new Hospital Board was given complete authority to manage the hospital and to adopt rules and regulations that would ensure the highest levels of patient care. That same authority and responsibility continues to this day.
Ironically, the early years of the new board mirrored the first few weeks of the advisory board in 1918. As soon as the complexities of opening a new hospital been cleared from its agenda it had to face the thankless task of ousting its superintendent.
McGilvray, who had enthusiastically guided the construction of the new hospital from 1949 to 1951, was accused of "discrepancies in equipment accounts" involving one of the suppliers. No charges were filed, but the superintendent's employment was "terminated" and the Hospital Board immediately began a search for his replacement.
Proving itself both independent and open-minded, the Hospital Board of 1952 hired a 48-year-old registered nurse from Massachusetts who had been administrator of a county hospital in Ithaca, New York, for seven years. Irene Oliver moved across the continent to Twin Falls, immediately took charge of the new Magic Valley Memorial Hospital, and stayed in command for 20 years.
"She was a tough lady and very dynamic," said Dr. Ben Katz, Twin Falls pediatrician and former board member. "She brought a positive and progressive attitude to this hospital.
Oliver's term as administrator, together with the guidance of the Hospital Board, set Magic Valley Memorial Hospital on a steady course that maintained it through two decades of dramatic changes. In that time a terrifying polio epidemic was quelled, lung cancer was first attributed to smoking, important new antibiotics were developed, the first heart transplants occurred and Medicare was signed into law. At Magic Valley Memorial Hospital a pediatrics department was added, a coronary care unit with electrocardiograph equipment was established, electroencephalograms (EEGs) were introduced, and the hospital became the first in Idaho to be accredited. The demand for outpatient services were increasing while the average length of a hospital stay started to fall.
Shrewd budgeting and a policy of reinvesting profits allowed Magic Valley Memorial Hospital to modernize and expand its facilities without additional county indebtedness. A $480,000 remodeling project in 1965 enlarged radiology and laboratory departments. An auditorium was constructed, air conditioning was introduced, nursing classrooms were added and office space was improved.
Between 1952 and 1972, the hospital's annual budget grew from $695,000 to $3.8 million; average bed occupancy increased from 46 percent to 81 percent; private room rates increased from $12 per day to $52 per day; average stay dropped from 5.7 days to 5 days; admissions increased from 4,513 patients in 1952 to 7,159 in 1972; births fell from 1,171 babies born in 1952 to just 841 babies born at the hospital in 1972.
So great was her influence on Magic Valley Memorial Hospital and the community, that when she announced her retirement in 1972, largely due to her failing eyesight, Irene Oliver was referred to as "Mrs. Hospital" by the Twin Falls Times-News. Her departure marked the end of an era of steady growth, conservative management and quiet confidence and ushered in a more difficult period for the hospital and the community.
In 1974, for the first time in its history, the hospital was turned down by the public in its request for a bond issue. Although 62 percent of voters approved of the $4.6 million hospital expansion bond, it failed to gain the two-thirds majority it needed. Another bond was floated just 10 months later, but it too failed and by a wider margin.
Like the old Twin Falls County Hospital before it, Magic Valley Memorial Hospital was facing obsolescence just 25 years after construction. Designed with an emphasis on bed patients needing restorative care, the facility was struggling to adapt to the health community's new emphasis on preventative care and the public's demand for more outpatient treatments. Fire and safety codes had changed in the interim and so had accreditation standards. Fire alarms, doors, power systems, emergency generator and even the electrical wiring of the hospital was no longer up to code.
Bruised by its bond defeats, the Hospital Board resolved to handle its growth problems without another appeal to voters. Instead, the hospital would seek ways to finance its own expansion or construct a new facility without relying on taxpayers. In 1979, the Board even refused the hospital's portion of county mill levy, which the hospital had been receiving since 1918. Ever since, the hospital has operated without tax dollars from Twin Falls County.
Several avenues of expansion were explored during the 1970s, including construction of an entirely new hospital, an idea which had won the support of many doctors. But after scrapping several plans the Board decided, in December, 1979, that renovation of the existing hospital would be the most cost effective approach.
The $26.7 million expansion project, which was essentially a complete remodel of the hospital and the addition of a new three-story wing, was financed through a complicated formula made possible by the Idaho Health Facilities Authority, a state agency created to help health care institutions with construction projects. The 30-year bond floated to pay for the upgrade is due to be paid off in 2004.
With its new wing and new quarters for surgery, emergency room, labs, ICU, CPU and physical therapy, as well as facelifts in nearly every department, the new hospital was as much unlike Magic Valley Memorial Hospital as it was from Twin Falls County Hospital. Noting this and recognizing the regional nature of the hospital's reach, the Hospital Board changed the name of its 165-bed facility to Magic Valley Medical Center on March 23, 1982.
Not long afterward, in 1986, the hospital faced a test of one of its founding tenets: public ownership. A proposal was made to transfer ownership of the hospital to a non-profit corporation to help it survive decreasing patient numbers, shorter hospital stays and shrinking federal Medicare reimbursements. Put to a vote in December of that year, the proposal was defeated by a 60 percent plurality.
Since that date, the MVMC has continued to grow and expand its services using reserve funds set aside for new construction. The Southern Idaho Regional Cancer Center was added onto the hospital in 1989 and a Transitional Care Unit built in 1994. The next year an enhanced Women and Infants Center was constructed.
In 1997, the hospital added a Diagnostic Cardiac Catheterization Lab and acquired Canyon View Hospital. This was followed by construction of the 56,000-square-foot Medical Office Building, which opened this spring.
Today's hospital may not look much like the one that Twin Falls County built in 1918 and its medical treatments are far beyond what anyone could have dreamed of back then, but the foundation of the institution -- its public ownership, its self-reliance, and its commitment to serve the public good rather than some private profit --has held firm.
** A New Era **
In January 2001, Magic Valley Medical Center and the Twin Falls Clinic and Hospital merged to form one regional health care system to serve residents in South Central Idaho. With this partnership, we hope to bring to the this region expanded health care services, more diverse medical staff and improved patient care.
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