Pen Bay Medical Center



Mark Fourre, MD,
President, Coastal Healthcare Alliance



Dear Community Members, Friends and Supporters,

As you can imagine, our primary focus in 2020 was on caring for our coastal communities as we all confronted the new reality of living and working in a pandemic. I am proud of the dedication and courage our entire care team displayed as we prepared for the arrival of COVID-19.

We began preparations in February as the first cases emerged in Seattle. When Governor Janet Mills announced the first positive case in Maine in mid-March, we activated our incident command structure. Executive and clinical leaders met daily to make timely decisions, evaluate how to address the needs of outpatient practices and plan for a potential surge in COVID-19 patients.

Clinical staff, support staff and maintenance team members all collaborated to retrofit patient rooms, creating stand-alone testing facilities and developing new procedures. We limited visitors in all of our facilities and introduced masking requirements for all care team members and patients.

To focus on these preparations and provide for patient and care team safety, we suspended elective surgeries and non-urgent office visits. To ensure that patients still received the care they needed, we began offering secure telehealth video visits.

To ensure that patients still received the care they needed, we began offering secure telehealth video visits.By mid-April, COVID numbers stabilized across the state, due in large part to our community’s commitment to masking and social distancing. We know these new behaviors were and continue to be difficult for many. However, they have worked extremely well to reduce community transmission, and we encourage everyone to continue their social distancing regimens. As we prepared for and then cared for our first COVID-19 patients, there was an overwhelming outpouring of support from our community. You protected us by donating masks, fed us with pizza deliveries and inspired us with your words of gratitude. Schoolchildren raised money and planted signs of encouragement at our hospital entrances. All of us at Pen Bay Medical Center (PBMC) and Waldo County General Hospital (WCGH) want you to know that it made a difference. We often talk about our vision of making our communities the healthiest in America. Your embrace reminded us that you share this vision, too. Thank you.

In May, we began planning to welcome back patients with time-sensitive needs whose procedures and appointments had been postponed due to COVID-19. Our priority was to maintain the highest level of patient, care team and community safety in accordance with federal, state and local guidance for controlling the spread of COVID-19. We implemented daily screening of all care team members and expanded testing of asymptomatic patients. The later allowed us to identify patients at risk of complications following procedures and increase the safety of our staff. We also modified our waiting rooms to provide patients with no-contact check-in and check-out and continued our rigorous cleaning and sanitation efforts.

With these safety preparations in place, we have now resumed serving the needs of all patients.

This does not mean we are back to normal. Visiting the doctor today is different than it was before COVID-19. For example, all patients, team members and visitors continue to be screened before entering our facilities, and all are required to wear a mask and practice social distancing and good hand hygiene. These extra steps take more time and can seem burdensome, like putting on a pair of heavy boots in the winter, but they are necessary to ensure everyone’s safety.

Our new normal will also include an ongoing role for telemedicine as an efficient way to care for patients whose conditions do not require a face-to-face visit. This will take getting used to for both care providers and patients, but will reduce health care costs and free up resources to provide care to even more patients.

One thing that won’t change is our commitment to providing the very best health care to our coastal communities.The new normal will also require us to respond to the economic realities of the pandemic. When we suspended elective surgeries and non-urgent office visits, we also lost the revenue associated with providing this care.

Fortunately, we entered the pandemic in strong financial shape and will weather this loss, but it has forced us to postpone a number of non-essential capital projects and to tighten budgets across all departments.

One thing that won’t change is our commitment to providing the very best health care to our coastal communities. While these past few months have presented all of us with a remarkable challenge, our care teams at PBMC and WCGH have remained steadfast in their commitment to our shared vision of making our communities the healthiest in America. I am proud of them all and ask that you join me in thanking them for their dedication and commitment.

Mark Fourre, MD
President
Pen Bay Medical Center & Waldo County General Hospital

 

Please note, some of the photos in this report were taken pre-COVID and do not reflect current MaineHealth protocols for masking, eye protection and social distancing.

Waldo County General Hospital

Dear Community Members, Friends and Supporters,

As you can imagine, our primary focus in 2020 was on caring for our coastal communities as we all confronted the new reality of living and working in a pandemic. I am proud of the dedication and courage our entire care team displayed as we prepared for the arrival of COVID-19.

We began preparations in February as the first cases emerged in Seattle. When Governor Janet Mills announced the first positive case in Maine in mid-March, we activated our incident command structure. Executive and clinical leaders met daily to make timely decisions, evaluate how to address the needs of outpatient practices and plan for a potential surge in COVID-19 patients.

Clinical staff, support staff and maintenance team members all collaborated to retrofit patient rooms, creating stand-alone testing facilities and developing new procedures. We limited visitors in all of our facilities and introduced masking requirements for all care team members and patients.

To focus on these preparations and provide for patient and care team safety, we suspended elective surgeries and non-urgent office visits. To ensure that patients still received the care they needed, we began offering secure telehealth video visits.

To ensure that patients still received the care they needed, we began offering secure telehealth video visits.By mid-April, COVID numbers stabilized across the state, due in large part to our community’s commitment to masking and social distancing. We know these new behaviors were and continue to be difficult for many. However, they have worked extremely well to reduce community transmission, and we encourage everyone to continue their social distancing regimens. As we prepared for and then cared for our first COVID-19 patients, there was an overwhelming outpouring of support from our community. You protected us by donating masks, fed us with pizza deliveries and inspired us with your words of gratitude. Schoolchildren raised money and planted signs of encouragement at our hospital entrances. All of us at Pen Bay Medical Center (PBMC) and Waldo County General Hospital (WCGH) want you to know that it made a difference. We often talk about our vision of making our communities the healthiest in America. Your embrace reminded us that you share this vision, too. Thank you.

In May, we began planning to welcome back patients with time-sensitive needs whose procedures and appointments had been postponed due to COVID-19. Our priority was to maintain the highest level of patient, care team and community safety in accordance with federal, state and local guidance for controlling the spread of COVID-19. We implemented daily screening of all care team members and expanded testing of asymptomatic patients. The later allowed us to identify patients at risk of complications following procedures and increase the safety of our staff. We also modified our waiting rooms to provide patients with no-contact check-in and check-out and continued our rigorous cleaning and sanitation efforts.

With these safety preparations in place, we have now resumed serving the needs of all patients.

This does not mean we are back to normal. Visiting the doctor today is different than it was before COVID-19. For example, all patients, team members and visitors continue to be screened before entering our facilities, and all are required to wear a mask and practice social distancing and good hand hygiene. These extra steps take more time and can seem burdensome, like putting on a pair of heavy boots in the winter, but they are necessary to ensure everyone’s safety.

Our new normal will also include an ongoing role for telemedicine as an efficient way to care for patients whose conditions do not require a face-to-face visit. This will take getting used to for both care providers and patients, but will reduce health care costs and free up resources to provide care to even more patients.

The new normal will also require us to respond to the economic realities of the pandemic. When we suspended elective surgeries and non-urgent office visits, we also lost the revenue associated with providing this care.

One thing that won’t change is our commitment to providing the very best health care to our coastal communities.Fortunately, we entered the pandemic in strong financial shape and will weather this loss, but it has forced us to postpone a number of non-essential capital projects and to tighten budgets across all departments.

One thing that won’t change is our commitment to providing the very best health care to our coastal communities. While these past few months have presented all of us with a remarkable challenge, our care teams at PBMC and WCGH have remained steadfast in their commitment to our shared vision of making our communities the healthiest in America. I am proud of them all and ask that you join me in thanking them for their dedication and commitment.

Mark Fourre, MD
President
Pen Bay Medical Center &
Waldo County General Hospital