OAKHURST – Oakhurst Community Medical Center will transition operations to Adventist Health effective June 1.
For almost four decades Community Medical Centers’ healthcare facility in Oakhurst served the mountain communities and its visitors.
“Adventist Health impressed us with its reputation for expanding access to quality care in the 22 rural communities it serves in Kings, Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties,” said Tom Moser, COO for Clovis Community Medical Center.
Adventist Health plans to operate the clinic from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. seven days a week and offer an array of family practice services. Moser said, “We are pleased to learn they are considering expanding services to include pediatrics, OB, dental and diabetes education.”
Adventist Health plans to interview and hopefully retain most of the staff at the Oakhurst Center and all the full-time and part-time employees will be offered a severance package upon ending employment with Community.
“Our Human Resources Department will provide support of our Oakhurst Center’s employees and is available to discuss options during this four-month transition. We’ll have recruitment support and career counseling through one-on-one meetings,” said Lowell Hull, Clovis Community’s director of Human Resources.
Adventist plans to interview for nurse practitioners, physician assistants, licensed vocational nurses, medical assistants, registration clerks, support staff and possibly others. They also plan on contracting with physicians.
“Community deeply appreciates the dedication and the exceptional care our employees and physicians have provided our patients over the years,” Moser said.
As for the future of Intermediate Care (the facility known locally as Urgent Care), we received this response to our inquiries about that facility from Michelle Von Tersch, Communications Director at Community Medical Centers:
“Emergency-level services are not currently provided at Oakhurst Community Medical Center, and we don’t expect Adventist to offer that level of care. The vast majority of the patients the Center currently treats are well served by our clinic. Adventist specializes in caring for patients in rural communities, including several mountain communities, and is prepared to address a wide variety of healthcare needs. Trauma and medical emergency cases would be transferred to the appropriate hospital emergency department, as they are now.”
This article begs more questions than it answers. It doesn’t clarify, for instance, if the Urgent Care part if the facility will still be functioning as such. This community can ill-afford to lose it’s only first line emergency department, even if it’s just to stabilize and evaluate those which need to be sent on down the hill to a hospital. And don’t even get me started on how ridiculous it is that a community this size doesn’t have a hospital but Mariposa does? REALLY? Welcome to the new guys in town. Maybe you can talk some sense in to whoever is making these asinine decisions about the medical fate of this entire community of people who don’t seem to matter enough to *someone important* to rate having their own hospital that could save lives instead of having them wasted while waiting on ambulances making hour+ long treks down the mountain to city hospitals.
We have a call into Adventist Health for answers to whether or not they will have an emergency room. As of now, they have not responded. We will continue to attempt to contact them. Gina Clugston, Editor
I have to add my voice to Ms. Downs’. When I broke my ankle I was able to take a 15 min. ride to Oakhurst to get x-rays, pain meds, and a temporary cast. When my daughter cut her foot on a Sunday night it took over an hour just to get to an urgent care in Fresno…that is not acceptable. I also know several older people in our community who need to have access to urgent care closer to home. I don’t understand what it takes to justify an urgent care facility…surely we have the population to support at least 1.