Knox County hospital among nation’s rural Top 100
A variety of metrics are measured to gauge how well different levels of care are performing when it comes to administering patient care.
While the staff and administrators at the district certainly look to excel in providing healthcare to its patients -- whether it's in the hospital, two clinics, retail medical equipment location, home health, assisted living facility and more -- there is more to what drives this top rural hospital in
"I still go back to the reason we're on the list is because we have more people who grew up here who work here who know those people who walk through the door," he said. "It's more like a family atmosphere. I think each one of us spend more energy taking care of our own family than we would taking care of someone we didn't know, so I feel like that's what sets us apart more than anything."
Stephen's wife
The first medical doctor came to the agriculture and oil and gas county in the early 1900s to practice horse-and-buggy house-call medicine for its residents. The first hospital was soon established about a block or so northeast of the existing facility, which was built in the 1920s and added onto in the 1940s and 1960s.
The community went without a hospital for a brief nine-month period in 1987 when voters in the county decided to close the financially struggling facility. Voters relatively quickly decided to bring back the hospital district, but services such as surgical and labor and deliver were no longer offered.
Now, the 14-bed hospital provides Level IV emergency room, laboratory, radiology, physical and speech therapy, cardiac rehabilitation and an ambulance service.
"We get several swing-bed patients -- that's where they come back here for rehab, (for example). They don't need acute care, but they need some skilled nursing such as physical therapy or IV antibiotics," she said. "We do have our acute care. We can keep the pneumonias and flus. If you need a ventilator, you're going to be going" to a higher level of care.
Patients, depending on the family's request, are typically transferred to
Another ingredient to KCHD's success is having homegrown products, such as the Kuehlers and administrative assistant
Stephen said KCHD is night and day from where it was when he returned home roughly 16 years ago to where it is today, and he's not finished. He said they have remodeled portions of the hospital over the years and will continue to improve the facility, hopefully with a new emergency room in the future. He said they've been able to secure grant funding over the past several years to the tune of about
Sheila said having a hospital in a rural community that could be almost an hour from the next hospital is sometimes the difference between life and death.
"How important is life?" she asked. "If you have a heart attack, we can give you (the medications) and get you on to where you need to be. If you're not breathing, we can get you intubated."
She said their nursing staff is trained in provided trauma and life-saving care to get patients stable before sending them out.
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