SEQUIM — The next new Olympic Medical Center facilities likely will be built in Sequim.
OMC CEO Eric Lewis said Tuesday that health care needs in the eastern part of the district include more room in the Sequim Cancer Center for its pharmacy and infusion facilities, more exam rooms at OMC’s primary care and specialty clinics, and rooms for integrative medicine — sometimes called alternative medicine — that can include acupuncture, stress-reduction and massage.
Plan for coming decade
“We’re going to plan space for the coming decade and beyond in Sequim,” Lewis told OMC commissioners meeting at the Sequim medical campus, 840 N. Fifth Ave.
Those plans could start to become realities in 2016, he said.
Currently, OMC is constructing a new 42,000-square-foot, $16.2 million medical office building across from the main hospital at 939 Caroline St. in Port Angeles and just finished expanding the hospital’s emergency room.
The next round of construction will take place in Sequim, Lewis said.
Care for women
Tuesday’s meeting also included a brief forum for residents who included Mary Field, who said she moved to Sequim this summer after working for 40 years in hospital administration.
She urged commissioners to include comprehensive reproductive health care for women in the medical center’s services.
“I’m hoping that you’re moving in that direction if you’re not already there,” she said, applauding Lewis’ statement that a second obstetrician/gynecologist is one of OMC’s top recruiting priorities.
Lewis also said commissioners were committed to maintaining an independent, locally governed hospital.
He noted that Harrison Medical Center in Bremerton recently became part of CHI (Catholic Health Initiatives) Franciscan Health, a network of 93 hospitals headquartered in Denver.
Field said she had worked for Catholic hospitals, which she said “bring important values to health care,” but she said she doubted they would offer a full range of women’s reproductive health services.
That, she said, might also apply to so-called “death with dignity” provisions.
End-of-life options
Dr. Mary Wegmann of Port Angeles also urged commissioners to “take a very comprehensive approach toward end-of-life care, on palliative care [in which terminal patients are treated only for their pain].”
She urged them to offer “lots more education” about end-of-life choices with “a very strong emphasis” on advanced directives to doctors and physician orders for life-sustaining treatment (POLST).
Field agreed, saying, “I think the cultural approach to death and dying is shifting gradually.”
Endorse bond?
On another Sequim-related front, commissioners heard Brandino Gibson, vice chairman of Citizens for Sequim Schools, ask them to endorse the district’s $49.3 million bond issue on the Nov. 3 ballot.
OMC commission President Tom Oblak directed the hospital staff to prepare a resolution of endorsement for commissioners to consider at their next meeting Oct. 21.
Commissioners took no action on requests from Dr. Bill Kintner, medical director for primary care at Olympic Medical Physicians, to spend $105,000 for new exam tables for OMC’s two family-practice clinics and to earmark $85,000 to set new salary standards for doctors and for advanced practice clinicians such as nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
Doctors who recently have left OMC, Kintner said, included low pay among their reasons for resigning.
The current compensation schedule is 4 to 5 years old, he said, and was done in-house. He asked that national consultant SullivanCotter & Associates be asked to conduct the study.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
