Page 8 - Explore Lonoke County 2020

8SS SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 2020
ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT TO THE THREE RIVERS EDITION OF THE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE • EXPLORE LONOKE COUNTY
MEET
YOUR NEIGHBOR
Ronnie Ashmore
PARKS AND RECREATION DIRECTOR CITY OF CARLISLE
WHAT WAS IT LIKE GROWING UP IN CARLISLE? Everyone in town knew everyone else. It has always been a very tight-knit community.
WHAT DO YOU ENJOY MOST ABOUT YOUR JOB? I enjoy getting to watch the kids learn to love sports and watch them as they grow up playing sports.
WHY IS THE PARKS DEPARTMENT IMPORTANT TO THE CITY? The parks department is important to maintain the community’s growth. Without the kids, the city won’t grow.
WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR HOBBIES?
I enjoy hunting and boating.
WHAT IS YOUR DREAM VACATION?
My dream vacation is to travel to the Grand Canyon, to see the natural sites in the United States.
WHAT MAKES THE AREA GREAT FOR RAISING A FAMILY? As it was when I was growing up, Carlisle is a very tight-knit community, and everyone watches out for everyone else.
IS THERE ANYTHING ABOUT CARLISLE THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO ADD?
To give a little insight as to how good the community is and how well its residents take care of each other, on Aug. 7, 2019, my 16-year- old son was in a truck wreck and lost his left arm. The community as a whole stepped up to make sure he was taken care of, as well as taking care of my entire family.
MEDICAL ATTENTION New Cabot Emergency Hospital provides lifeline to community
BY DWAIN HEBDA / CONTRIBUTING WRITER
As president and CEO of the Cabot Cham- ber of Commerce, Amy Williams had plenty of economic-development reasons to be ex- cited about the opening of Cabot Emergency Hospital last year. e growing Lonoke Coun- ty doesn’t have a community hospital; thus residents seeking hospital-grade emergency medical attention had to drive to other cities’ facilities for care.
But just six weeks after the Cabot Emer- gency Hospital opened, Williams gained a deeper and far more personal gratitude for the existence of the new health care facility.
“ e Saturday after anksgiving, my 14-year-old son complained of stomach pain, and we figured it was just all the junk we had eaten over the weekend,” Williams said. “After [his pain] persisted, we thought it might be appendicitis, so we headed to the ER in Cabot just to get him checked out.
“ e nurses, the doctor got him in, [did a] CT scan, blood work, everything they needed to do to determine what was going on. Within an hour to hour and a half, we had a diagnosis of appendicitis — got to Children’s [Hospital in Little Rock] and got [his appendix] out. It hadn’t ruptured; everything was good.”
Such stories are exactly the kind of outcomes envisioned by the team that brought the $13 million, 17,000-square-foot Cabot Emergency Hospital to fruition, said Dr. Charles Mason, the hospital’s medical director and ownership partner.
“Obviously, health care has gotten some- what difficult with some of the smaller fa- cilities struggling to stay open,” Mason said, “yet they still need health care in those communities. Cabot is an area that we rec- ognized had no [emergency or hospital] health care.
“ e whole hospital is owned by physi- cians; there’s eight of us total. Six of us actu- ally work here, and we trade off on 12-hour shifts. We’re all ER doctors, so we can take folks, no matter what their emergency is, and we stabilize them, and we can make the transfer.”
Mason’s hands-on partners include Drs. Scott Darnell, Jim Box, Brian Baird, Scott Archer and Justin White in Arkansas, all of whom have extensive experience in emergency-department medicine. Two
DWAIN HEBDA/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Dr. Charles Mason, medical director of Cabot Emergency Hospital, shows off the facility’s MRI equipment. After quickly building a local clientele, the specialty hospital is eyeing expansion.
nonresident partners, Drs. Tom Vo and Matthew Young, lend their expertise as part of NuTex Health, a Texas-based network of standalone facilities in eight states, of which Vo is CEO, and Young is co-medical director. e eight doctors’ combined medical expertise means the Cabot facility can treat most any patient who comes through the door.
“ e emergency department is a catch- all place. We’ve always been the open door for everything that is out there because we’re open 24 hours,” Mason said. “It may be something very simple, like a small lac- eration or a rash, to the very life-threaten- ing things that we see — the cardiac arrest, the respirator difficulties. You have to be prepared to take on all that.
“ at said, I don’t think of us as just emergency care. e hospital itself has the capability of doing outpatient studies for X-rays, and we do have four inpatient beds. Even though the size of our facility makes
us primarily a large emergency depart- ment, we focus on the care of the patients. No matter what their problem is, we’re go- ing to take care of it.”
One element of Cabot Emergency Hospi- tal that really jumps out is Mason’s assertion that wait times are virtually nonexistent. He said this is a result of lower patient volume; systems and protocols designed for efficien- cy; and the collective expertise of the facili- ty’s 45 staffers.
“We have it set up so the lab can be done in minutes instead of hours. We have X-rays right across the hall that can be done almost instantaneously,” Mason said. “We’ve got it set up so that our radiologists read our films, and we get those reads back within 10 minutes, which is something we never were able to achieve in the larger cities.”
e hospital has also proven its nimble- ness in responding to the COVID-19 pan- demic. e site offers rapid antigen testing
SUBMITTED PHOTO