July-September, 2003

St. John's opens new surgery center to meet growing health needs
By Jay Eckersley, St. John's president/CEO

Welcome to the summer/fall 2003 edition of St. John's Healthy People magazine.  

We hope you are having a safe and happy summer, spending time with family and friends and enjoying our beautiful Ozarks outdoors.

We continue to renew the main campus of St. John's with the new outpatient surgery center and medical office building nearing completion and our new emergency trauma center taking shape as well. Other St. John's facility improvement projects are taking place in Lebanon, Aurora and Cassville.

We are proud to announce that St. John's was named No. 27 of the Top 100 Integrated Health Systems in the country by Verispan Inc. earlier this year. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our valued physicians and talented co-workers for making this important designation possible.

This issue of Healthy People tells the story of 5-year-old cochlear implant patient Eli Thurman, who was born deaf but can now hear a whisper, thanks to St. John's cochlear implant program. We also include a touching profile about longtime Springfield resident and colon cancer survivor Marjory Stiles, along with important updates from Dr. Alan Clark about severe acute respiratory virus, Lyme disease and West Nile virus and information about St. John's Trauma Services' docudrama program, which educates high school and college students about the dangers of driving under the influence.

Of course, no summer edition of Healthy People would be complete without information about heat stroke and poison ivy prevention.

Our readers will also notice a St. John's Foundation for Community Health donation envelope in this issue of Healthy People magazine. The demand for health services is increasing in the Ozarks. As our population continues to age, more health care professionals, facilities and equipment will be needed to provide required services. Those needs will grow even as the payment for those services declines. Budget concerns on the federal and state levels have meant a cut in some payments for physicians and hospitals. Meanwhile, new developments in technology and pharmaceuticals, such as the new drug-eluting stent St. John's began providing in the spring, make it even more expensive to provide the latest advances that our patients have come to expect. It is with this backdrop that St. John's Foundation for Community Health was formed in 2000.

Now and even more in the future, the generosity of St. John's supporters will be increasingly important in meeting the health needs of the Ozarks.