Essentia St. Mary’s Hospital-Superior Stays True to Its Roots
The last time Positively Superior visited Superior’s hospital for a story was in 2013, when the institution was celebrating its 50th anniversary and just five years after it had come under the Essentia umbrella.
Much has changed at Essentia St. Mary’s Hospital-Superior, but not the community spirit that first brought the hospital to the city.
Superior Memorial Hospital opened in 1963 after the community – individuals and organizations – rallied to raise funds to build it. The effort drew national attention, including a story in Modern Hospital magazine that marveled at the thought of a city with a population of only 35,000 could raise $1.2 million to build a hospital, especially when there is a hospital-rich neighbor city just across a bridge.
Hospital Administrator Kim Pearson understands that community spirit because it exists to this day. In fact, it’s one of the reasons the hospital has grown in so many ways with Essentia at the helm.
The longtime rural Douglas County resident has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the hospital.
“I’ve worked for Essentia my whole career, but 30 years in Duluth,” she said. “I’m an OB (obstetrics) nurse by background. I worked about 25 years in the OB department. And then I came over here as the director of nursing, it will be eight years in February.”
In February 2020 Pearson was named hospital administrator, and since then has overseen a growth in the number of people served and types of care given at the hospital.
“Part of my job in Duluth was to make sure that there were beds for patients, and a lot of times, Duluth’s very busy, there wasn’t always a bed available,” she said. “And then I came over here, and there was all these beds. And I said, we should try to fill these beds. At that time, the average daily census up on our med-surg floor was three to four patients. Now it’s 18. We had maybe about 30 visits a day, now we’re 45 to 50. The clinic had 12 providers, now we’ve got 20. We have 18 different specialties that come over from Duluth, so pretty much every specialty there is.”
Part of that can be attributed to “If you build it…” – if you begin offering a service patients once had to travel elsewhere for, the numbers are going to go up.
“Sometimes you hear people say, ‘Well, I don’t want to go across the bridge’,” Pearson said. “I think what they really don’t want is to navigate one-way streets in Duluth, construction, remembering what parking ramp they parked in, things like that.”
Director of Nursing Adrienne Radovich said the growth has come from recognizing gaps in care and listening to patients.
“We’re asking ‘How can we make that work?,” recognizing that our patients truly do want to stay local and in our community. We just know that people do better when they’re in their own community, close by family, close by home and resources. So we are really motived by growth and making it easier for access to care.”
But another part of the hospital’s growth is having savvy leadership that understands what needs to be done to serve the community.
“The leadership team here is very committed to that,” Radovich said.
“A lot of our leadership team has worked in Duluth and other places,” Pearson said. “Sometimes you come with great ideas from other places. So, I think it’s a very, very committed leadership team.”
But there’s also a feeling of community at the hospital. Nothing can put a patient at ease like the feeling that we’re all in this together.
“The other thing you hear people say, that it still feels like a community hospital,” Pearson said. “People know their names, they greet them in the hallway, and so they like that feel of a small town, but they can get so many services here. I always say we get all the benefits of being part of a big health-care system but people still feel it is a small-town community hospital.”
“It truly takes a village,” Radovich said. “That’s what I think is so great. I actually don’t live over here. I live in Duluth, and I worked at Essentia in Duluth for 15 years before I came here four years ago. It’s such a difference of that community and small town that I just absolutely love. So That’s what we’re striving for.”
She adds that the Essentia connection is another plus for service.
“I think there’s peace of mind knowing that even if you come to the emergency room here, and let’s say we can’t do everything for that patient and they need to be transferred to tertiary care, the fact that we are part of that system, we get that patient to that next phase of where they need to go and set that up for that patient,” she said.
Added Services
“In the eight years that I’ve been here, everything that we put here grows,” Pearson said. “We’re proud of the fact that we’ve been able to add so many services. It’s interesting to try to fit them all in the right spot because it was originally built as 160-bed community hospital. Even though we’ve got a lot of square footage, we’re still a little bit space constrained.”
“We continue to have more and more specialists that are doing outreach and the patients are noticing that. We’d love to continue to provide them with more options to meet their health care needs and streamline it to the best of our ability.”
Essentia also invested $1.6 million in building a new inpatient pharmacy. “Now our pharmacy is fully automated and just beautiful,” Pearson said.
“We added the infusion center about two years ago, and we started being able to give chemotherapy in July. There’s been, of course, lots of advances in the way that cancer treatment is given,” Pearson said. “We added urgent care in October of 2020 and joint replacement surgery in August of 2020. That’s probably one of the bigger things. People used to spend three nights in the hospital. Now more than half the patients go home the same day. Those that do stay just spend the night and are gone by lunch the next day. People used to spend a couple of days in the hospital after joint replacement surgery, but now, we’re finding many of our patients spend one night or less in the hospital.
Pearson said magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) came to the hospital in 2018 and since then has grown from being offered three days a week to five. Still, the schedule was filled.
“Just two weeks ago we moved from eight hours of MRI appointments to 12, and that’s filled,” she said.
Pearson said the hospital is now hoping to add a bone density scanner for chemotherapy patients and a mobile positron emission tomography (PET) scanner that detects early signs of cancer, heart disease and brain conditions.
“There is always talk about more services over here in Superior,” Pearson said. “I mean, we’re not going to start doing neurosurgery in Superior. We’re not going to start doing open heart surgery in Superior. That’s just not feasible. But we offer a lot.”
Emergency Room and Urgent Care
“We have a really great ER,” Pearson said. “All of the doctors that work in our ER, they work in all of our ERs. So they could be working in Duluth Level 1 Trauma Center one day and they could be in Sandstone, Minnesota, the next day. Their skills are top notch. I’m very confident in our ER docs and staff. They can do a lot. It’s one of the best things about that model is that they really keep their skills up.”
The hospital’s decision to open an Urgent Care clinic in October 2020 was a much-needed option for the patients of Superior. It provided another option for less-acute care than the emergency department would offer.
“Adding urgent care was huge,” Radovich said.
She recalls that everyone was concerned about seeing numbers drop in ER with the opening of urgent care, “but our ER numbers have only grown,” she said. “Urgent care has been huge for patients and is used a lot, and it’s made a huge difference on this campus.”
“The other thing we do have the luxury of here is we also have primary care access,” Pearson said. “So if a patient comes in and the registration person sees that they don’t have like a primary care provider and we have an opening, they will say, ‘You know, I could get you in to see one of our primary care providers. Depending on the severity of a patient’s health concerns, our staff is well trained and will direct them to the approrptiate level of care. They’re coming with other things, minor things that would be perfect to get them into primary care. So we really try to get people in for same-day appointments and get them to hopefully establish care.”
Mental Health Services
“We’ve got pretty robust mental health services here,” Pearson said. “We have our adult partial hospitalization program, which is like an outpatient day treatment. We’ve got quite a few psychotherapists, behavioral health counselors. The wait is always longer than we want it to be. We have a provider in Spooner that is embedded in that clinic that does child through adult behavioral health. That’s really rare to have somebody in a rural site. There is a huge need for mental health treatment and we are trying to meet that need with the help of our community partners. I’m on three different mental health work groups within Superior, working to achieve that. Essentia works closely with Hope Haven Respite House that NAMI is opening in Superior. We try to be a really good partner with them. We fund the Warmline, which right now is a number that patients can call 24 hours a day. Somebody will answer and we’ll give help and support and resources.
“There’s a lot of ways to look at mental health,” Pearson said. “We do everything we can do to try to keep people out of the ER in crisis and out of needing inpatient services, and if they do then we try to get them in somewhere as quickly as we can.”
Pearson said things have shifted so that primary care and ER doctors are mindful of mental health.
“That shift in thinking about the mental health as well as the physical was needed because a lot of times it affects the physical health,” she said. “The ER now deals with a variety of not only physical, but mental health concerns. Primary care has also had to expand to meet this change in the health care landscape. All of our staff need to be trained to be empathetic to mental health needs, and oftentimes, are well versed in available resources for help.”
The wake of the opioid crisis caused another shift for primary care doctors.
“Now a lot of them have got their addiction medicine certificate so that you don’t just need to wait to get into an addiction medicine doctor, our primary care doctors can assist with a lot of that now,” Pearson said. “Primary care docs have to know a lot of stuff.
A Catholic Hospital
“We are a Catholic hospital,” Pearson said. “Not every clinic and hospital within Essentia is. We have a chaplain here every day, Rev. Steven Burns. We do mass every Wednesday. He’s on our resiliency committee and he’s very embedded in our day-to-day operations. And so I think that we’re very mindful and very proud of the fact that we’re one of the Catholic hospitals. We celebrate the feast of St. Benedict and all of those things are very interwoven here, kind of like what I was used to at the main campus in Duluth.
“Our chaplain is just great,” Pearson said. “He goes to care rounds every day, and he’s also very supportive to staff. He has a truly open-door policy if staff want to stop down and talk to him. He’s very invested in the staff as well as the patients.”
In addition to serving as the hospital’s chaplain, Burns, a native of Scotland, is the parish priest at St. Alban the Martyr Episcopalian Church in superior.
Burns was a high school teacher of religious, moral and philosophical studies in Scotland. With summers offer, he satisfied his curiosity by visiting other parts of the world, which included a visit to America “to see what it’s about.”
It was his wife getting a job at Essentia that got him here.
“So I followed and trained as a chaplain,” he said.
Before taking the chaplain position at the Superior hospital, Burns spent eight years as an on-call chaplain in Duluth, which was very different from what he does now.
“It was heavy,” he said. “Eight years as a casual chaplain, so that was eight years of doing on-call work overnight and weekends. There’s a ministry of presence, being present in situation, so there’s times where even listening doesn’t matter,” he said. “When I was in Duluth I was often on call for the ICUs in the emergency department and we experienced a lot of traumas, a lot of death through drownings, accidents, shootings, stabbings. There’s a lot of grief involved and sometimes all you can do is be present. There are no amount of words that’s going to fix anything. It’s not going to make them feel any better. At least they don’t feel alone.
Now as hospital chaplain, besides prayer, Burns said his most important job is to have a listening ear.
“I sit and listen to their story,” he said. “There is a kind of confession type thing about it. We’re mandatory reporters, so if there’s any harm that they’re thinking about or suicidal ideation, yeah, we have to report that, but other than that, it stops right there.”
Burns said his hardest moments are helping families come to accept that the end is near for a loved one.
“When parents have lived a long life and their time is coming. We can’t keep them around forever. What way do you want them to survive?” he said. “They can
become hypoxic, personality might change, brain damage. Might not be the same person after CPR.”
He’s also tried to help young nurses who lack experience with death.
“I found it was helpful to walk through this with the staff. And from that we started resilience training,” he said. “Now we do a retreat. We try on doing it a couple of times a year, teaching resilience because everyone comes to work, they’ve got all the problems back home, whatever they’re going through at home, they’ve got to wrestle with everything that’s here at work, too. And, so, we thought maybe we should just do a retreat that focuses on building resilience, which is absolutely necessary in this kind of work. The next day is going to be the same. Something similar or maybe something out of left field, but just as challenging mentally. So I’m there for support.”
“Yes, staff love it,” Radovich said of the resiliency training. “And I think it’s really important to recognize the work that they do and recognizing that their well-being and their mental health is
important, and we have had a huge focus on well-being .”
The Future?
“We have outgrown our space. I think we’re very creative with the spaces that we do have, and are making it work as best as we can,” Radovich said. “Part of our mission at Essentia is to keep care as close to home as possible. Our goal going forward is to continue expanding and providing additional services and space so patients and their families can remain in their communities, while still having access to a variety of specialists that come with being part of an integrated health system.
We know that our patients appreciate the variety of specialty care we offer. Our hope for the future would be to continue expanding on that positive feedback and grow even further to meet the needs of our community.”
Jim Lundstrom is editor of Positively Superior.
