April Mathis and Mike Sheldon, Jr. are the proud parents of Ethan Blake Sheldon, the first baby to be born in the new North Valley Hospital addition. Ethan was born on Thursday, Sept. 30 at 8:36 a.m. weighing five pounds, seven ounces and measuring at 19
TONASKET – As of Friday, Oct. 1, the total amount due in warrants the North Valley Hospital District owes to Okanogan County was below the goal of $2.871 million.
“It’s been a couple of good months,” Bomi Bharucha, chief financial officer, said. “The cash collections have been slow in August and September, but we’ll be on track to make our weekly $25,000 payment. The Long-Term Care Division saved the day for us with a $125,000 transfer the other day. The Coast-to-Coast doctors have generated about $350,000 in September in outpatient funds while the doctors we’ve had here have generated $400,000.”
Bharucha said he plans to present the 2011 budget to the hospital board during their second October meeting, on Thursday, Oct. 28.
Support Services Director John Boyd announced during the board’s meeting on Thursday, Sept. 30, that the hospital staff has officially moved into the new addition, which is now up and running.
“We moved in on Monday and it was quite a day,” Boyd said. “Our maintenance crew and nursing staff started moving at 3 a.m. and we had an emergency room patient soon after. It was nice to see everybody moving around in there. Our first VA patient was taken through the process today. We’ve created an office in the hospital specifically for the VA and veteran Michael Stewart has been working with the VA to get more services in here.”
In her written report to the board, Judy Gladden of the Long Term Care Division said the Quality Assurance Nurses reviewed 14 of 55 residents’ charts last week and found an error rate of zero.
“Talk about improvement over the last several years,” Gladden wrote. “I’m so proud of all the staff that works on the MDSs and they should feel confident of their abilities as we move into this new arena of coding and rate calculations. I know I talk about MDS all the time, but in the extended care world, it drives everything we do from how we give care to what we get paid. It’s our comparative to accurately capturing the charges for the services provided as well as the nursing care plan and most other aspects of a resident’s daily life. Needless to say, we have several reasons to celebrate in the EC.”
Finally, since their first November meeting date fell on Veterans Day, the board voted to move that meeting up one week, to Thursday, Nov. 4 while leaving Thursday, Nov. 18 open for a second monthly meeting if necessary.
The next hospital board meeting is on Thursday, Oct. 14 in the boardroom.
