story by James Coburn, Staff Writer
INTEGRIS Health Community Hospitals recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of its facilities with The End of Summer Bash. The model for each facility was built around bringing health care closer to patients in the communities that they live, said Chris McAuliffe, CEO.
INTEGRIS Health Community Hospitals strives for shorter wait times, efficiency, and a more personalized care approach. INTEGRIS Health recognized a need for the community hospitals to offload their ER patients and create a better patient flow. Eight inpatient beds are in each of their four locations at 4801 SE 15th St. Del City, OKC West at 3000 S. Rockwell, 1401 SW 34th St. in Moore, and Council Crossing at 9417 N. Council Road. Each of those locations is partnered with full-service INTEGRIS Health partners for any necessary continued care.
The End of Summer Bash at INTEGRIS Health Community Hospital at Council Crossing was a casual meet and greet occasion with food, three individual tours of the inpatient unit.
Participants viewed the emergency department to understand its capabilities as well as the Telehealth system of 24/7 physician patient care.
It’s healthcare in your neighborhood. Sometimes larger hospitals have a few patients that struggle with finding parking and getting in the door. But at INTEGRIS Health Community Hospitals, the average time in-and-out is an hour.
Patients are seen and screened promptly after entering the door. A patient needing surgery can be stabilized and transferred to an INTEGRIS partner, full service hospital as soon as possible.
“We get the medical team started. A physician comes and evaluates the patient for whatever care needs to be done,” McAuliffe said.
Chief Nursing Officer Samantha Mitchell has been serving INTEGRIS Health Community Hospitals for five and a half years and brings 34 years of experience to her leadership role.
“It was really exciting to open new buildings and see everything come from the ground floor up.”
She oversees about 80 nurses who are part of the 180 employees at INTEGRIS Health Community Hospitals.
“I admire their compassion and their perseverance.” Mitchell said. “Our unique model of nursing and staffing provides the opportunity for those nurses to be more one-on-one with the patient. So, they get to spend more time with the patient and their families.
Nursing became an avenue for Mitchell to help people and be involved in different aspects of healthcare.
Mitchell is well prepared with a Master of Science in Nursing degree earned from the University of Phoenix and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from the Fran and Earl Ziegler College of Nursing at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences.
“I consider myself a servant leader,” she continued. “I’m truly here to serve the people I’ve been fortunate enough to oversee.”
Nurses present creative ideas and Mitchell is not afraid to try something to impact the patient experience.
“I think when you do that and you include the front-line staff, you get their eye in – you get their creativity – you get their engagement which all results in higher quality of care for the patients,” Mitchell said.
INTEGRIS Health provides many educational opportunities for the nursing staff. Some is as simple as watching a computer model to someone going shift to shift to discuss new products and processes.
“We even partner with our community such as EMS, Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, to provide educational opportunities for our staff,” she added. “And we listen to them. We let them tell us what their interested in learning.”
Additionally, INTEGRIS Health Community Hospitals reaches out to caring people to attract more RNs to the profession. The nursing profession ranks at the top of respected professions in the US.
Mitchell said the challenging years of COVID marked a change the nursing community.
“I think we as nurses who are still in the profession need to get back to some grass roots. We want this to be seen as a profession, as a career, as a calling verses a job,” she said
The pandemic taught nurses how resourceful they can be, Mitchell said. Being a smaller hospital, INTEGRIS Health Community Hospitals was still able to care for seriously ill patients while protecting the staff and facing a high learning curve.
“We can truly band together as a team with ways to treat new patients. We were all learning across the world how to best approach these patients, how to involve their families,” she said. “There was a time during COVID when isolation was a huge issue. And we want to make sure that families are still plugged into their loved ones because we know patients are going to heal faster when they have their loved ones involved with them.”
Mitchell believes there is always a glimmer of hope. There are always people performing acts of kindness for someone else, Mitchell said.
“And for me personally – I’m resilient. I’ve been able to overcome many challenges in my nursing career and led the team during the pandemic when we didn’t really know what that looked like, what that meant, how patients were going to respond, what the treatment was. And we were able to bond together and figure it out one day at a time,” she said.
Success is something to celebrate.
