Looking back on 2022

The end of the year is a good time to look back, celebrate our successes, recognize the challenges ahead and reflect on the journey of the past 12 months.

After COVID-19 dominated our activities at St. Charles in 2020 and 2021, 2022 was about accepting the virus as a part of normal life, incorporating it into the day-to-day care we provide and continuing to innovate and improve in areas across the health system.

When I think about what St. Charles has accomplished in 2022, I am enormously proud of our caregivers and physicians, our leadership and our organization as a whole. It takes incredible teamwork, laser focus and dedication to the communities we serve to push a regional health system forward in the midst of a pandemic and unprecedented financial challenges, and our team has done exactly that.

Here are just a few of the things we’ve done that come to mind:

• Early this year, we rolled out outpatient treatments for people with COVID-19, and our Urgent Care clinics are now federally designated Test to Treat sites where people at high risk of severe COVID-19 illness can get fast and easy access to therapeutics.
• We opened a new Infectious Disease clinic, which offers travel medicine consults to help keep Central Oregonians safe and healthy when they leave the country.
• We’ve expanded our Center for Women’s Health, adding three new physicians and improving access to reproductive health care for all women.
• We have established training programs that provide a path to a career in patient care for our caregivers in non-medical positions as well as people outside the organization looking to get into health care. These programs are helping us address our significant staffing shortages.
• We hired our first manager of caregiver inclusion and experience, who is dedicated to making sure St. Charles is a place where people feel like they belong. And for the second time in three years, we received national recognition for our work to welcome the LGBTQ+ community.
• Our Three Sisters Rural Track graduate medical education program in Madras – a partnership with OHSU – continues to develop largely behind the scenes, with an aim to bring doctors to Jefferson County in 2025.
• We’ve brought back in-person events, such as the Heaven Can Wait 5K walk/run in Redmond and the annual Hospice Auction in Prineville, as well as important community efforts such as Stop the Bleed training and our Living Beyond Breast Cancer series.
• We’ve implemented a system-wide focus on our financial recovery efforts, which has helped our bottom line in recent months. At the same time, we are significantly restructuring how we work into service lines to improve patient care, patient outcomes and patient satisfaction, and we have launched what we’re calling our One St. Charles strategy to bring our organization closer together and guide us into the future.

This is, of course, just some of the good work happening across the health system – work that will continue in 2023 and beyond.

Thank you for your support of St. Charles.

Sincerely,
Steve