Bruce Edwards, Vermont Business Magazine One of the Northeast Kingdom’s largest employers remains on sound financial ground.
Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital with 625 employees ended its fiscal year in good shape.
“Surprisingly good given what we were faced last spring,” said Shawn Tester, chief executive officer of the 25-bed hospital in St Johnsbury.
And the hospital’s chief financial officer went even further.
“Our year ending Sept. 30, 2020 was the sixth year in a row we had a positive operating margin and the ninth out of the last 10 years we’ve had a positive operating margin,” said CFO Bob Hersey.
Hersey said the hospital was able to rebound this year when its patient volumes bounced back once the state gave the go-ahead for elective surgeries to start back up. The state shut down elective surgeries in the early days of the pandemic as a preventive measure.
He also said the hospital took advantage of federal money to defray $1.6 million in COVID-associated costs.
“The fact the hospital was in pretty good financial position before COVID helped us weather through that as well,” Hersey said.
Tester added that at the outset of the pandemic the hospital invested heavily in emergency preparedness programs.
“We really made the changes necessary both to our infrastructure and our staffing protocols, staff training to ensure that if a wave did indeed hit us that we’d be prepared for that,” Tester said.
Those investments included expanding the number of rooms that are considered negative pressure rooms (rooms where the air turnover is much higher) to care for patients with a respiratory illness.
To guard against a shortage of personal protective equipment this winter, the hospital also ramped up its inventory of PPE .
Tester said the hospital had only two COVID patients in the spring and both recovered.
Like other hospitals in the state, Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital is faced with a nursing shortage.
Tester said the hospital has fewer traveling nurses today, partly because the pandemic has driven up demand at hot spots across the country where they’re paid a premium. But Tester also said the hospital has seen some success in recruiting nurses.
“I don’t want to say we’ve solved the problem,” he said. “Probably our biggest staffing challenge is nursing staff.”
The hospital has a plan to renovate and expand its emergency department and what is essentially the west wing.
“Our ED is woefully undersized for the volume of patients we see and that’s been a problem for the last several years,” Tester said.
But he said those plans were put on hold as a result of the COVID crisis.
“However, right now we are in the process of rebooting that effort and taking a hard look at what our needs really are,” he said.
Tester said the pandemic has highlighted the need for what he calls “drive-thru healthcare.”
For example, he said the hospital has a COVID testing site in the parking lot with a construction trailer and a covered portico. The hospital has also employed a similar process for giving flu shots.
“We have also stood up a respiratory care clinic at one of our primary care practices in a similar vein to keep patients who may be infectious out of the rest of the clinic,” Tester said.
He said the pandemic resulted in a surge this spring in telemedicine, but usage has dropped off dramatically since then.
Tester said the hospital has remained resilient thanks to the dedication of its employees and the community.
The hospital’s fiscal 2021 budget is $97 million.
Bruce Edwards is a freelance writer from Southern Vermont.