Community invited to attend May 16 St. Charles Family Care in La Pine grand opening

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 4, 2018

LA PINE, Ore. — St. Charles Health System is celebrating the completion of its newest family care clinic at 51781 Huntington Road in La Pine with a ribbon cutting ceremony and open house event May 16 at 5 p.m.

St. Charles Family Care in La Pine will serve the community of La Pine and nearby underserved communities, including Sunriver, Gilchrist, Crescent, Chiloquin, Chemult, Christmas Valley, Silver Lake and Fort Rock. Along with expanding services, the clinic will provide a medical home for the region that coordinates care throughout St. Charles Health System with the central point of access — primary care physicians — close to home.

“We’re so excited to celebrate the grand opening of our new clinic,” said John Weinsheim, president of St. Charles Medical Group. “This clinic, which will provide primary care, Immediate Care, radiology, lab, occupational and specialty services, will be a medical home to south county residents.”

St. Charles Foundation is celebrating raising $1.2 million to help fund the project. The Foundation received cash and pledges from individuals, foundations and businesses who want to see expanded health care in the south county area.

“With the help of our dedicated team of volunteers and the support of the Central Oregon community, we’re making this much-needed clinic a reality,” said Corinne Martinez, capital campaign co-chair. “There are still naming opportunities and bricks available to commemorate this milestone in our community.”

There will be limited parking available at the site for the grand opening celebration. Attendees are encouraged to take a shuttle from the La Pine Senior Activity Center at 16450 Victory Way. Shuttle rides will begin at 4:45 p.m. The event will begin with guest speakers, followed by a ribbon cutting and open house.

About St. Charles Health System

St. Charles Health System, Inc., headquartered in Bend, Ore., owns and operates St. Charles Bend, Madras, Prineville and Redmond. It also owns family care clinics in Bend, Madras, Prineville, Redmond and Sisters. St. Charles is a private, not-for-profit Oregon corporation and is the largest employer in Central Oregon with more than 3,800 caregivers. In addition, there are more than 350 active medical staff members and nearly 200 visiting medical staff members who partner with the health system to provide a wide range of care and service to our communities.

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"There are so many variables in patient care. You can’t have everything automatic. We do rely on the caregivers to turn lights off if they aren’t needed. On the floors, at 9 p.m., when visiting hours are over the light levels dim down. It’s bed time and people are winding down ... We have to keep the building pretty well-lit for safety reasons and security. But we do what we can."

- Al, electrical systems coordinator, on how St. Charles works to reduce light pollution

"You know when you walk into something like that it’s, you just have to let everything go, you know, and like you’re receiving and giving at the same time ... I always feel that when I go in - you’re giving something but you’re also receiving something back from them ... So when it comes out, it’s all one beautiful expression of love and caring. That’s what this place is, you know, I want it to be like that forever …"

-Bill, St. Charles Bend EKG Technician, on playing for our patients and their families

Sister Catherine (St. Charles CEO from 1969-1989) didn't make a lot of fans when she first started talking about building a new medical center on the east edge of Bend. In June 1969, she returned to St. Charles Memorial Hospital after nearly 20 years working as a nurse for her order in Indiana. The ink on her administrator's credentials had barely dried and already she was pushing for a fundamental change. 

"When I even mentioned the idea, they thought I was out of it," Hellmann said. "The Sisters of St. Joseph ... They could no way afford a new hospital. The community didn't think we needed one."

In the next six years, however, the spirited nun would win over the doubters with her vision of a modern medical center in the high desert. Faith and a newly-formed team would help her create an organization that would ensure St. Charles' continued growth in the decades to come. 

The St. Charles Memorial Hospital Hellmann left in 1951 was brand-new. A 38-bed wing had been added in 1958. But the community's growth was relentless even then. By 1969, crowding was a problem again. The medical staff and Sister Andrea, acting administrator before Hellmann arrived, had started looking at options. The Sisters of St. Joseph governing board wanted to expand the five-acre Hospital Hill site. Hellmann discerned quickly that would not meet the community's needs, and the board agreed to an independent study. In the meantime, the existing building was remodeled, expanding the hospital to 99 beds in 1971.

Planning for the new hospital began in earnest in 1970. The consultants came back with a proposal for a hospital on the east side of Bend. A facility to serve the 64,000 people living in the area, as well as to accommodate population growth, would cost $12 million. Neither the Mother House of the Sisters of St. Joseph nor the Baker Diocese could afford it. The community was dubious as well, but as in 1948, it rallied behind its hospital.

"They came to me and said, 'Sister, we decided we want our medical center,' but they said 'nowhere on God's earth will we get $12 million,'" Hellmann recalled. "I said last year, 1969, we made the first step on the moon ... are you committed to making the first step ... they couldn't say no to taking the first step."

In 1971, representatives of the community, the medical staff and the Sisters of St. Joseph established St. Charles Memorial Hospital, Inc., later changed to St. Charles Medical Center, Inc., a non-profit corporation. Hellmann became president and chief executive officer. Early in 1972, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Indiana, turned over $3 million in assets and buildings it had accrued in its 54-year presence in Bend. That same year, the City of Bend lent its bonding authority to qualify the project for tax-exempt revenue bonds.

In the meantime, Sister Catherine had fallen in love with 68-acres of juniper trees and cow pasture east of Pilot Butte. A few farm houses dotted the area then; town ended on the east side of the butte. That worried some and offended a few.

"There were implications particularly moving out here, that we were leaving town. We were out by Harney County somewhere, because there was nobody out here at that time," recalled Roger Highland, then vice president of fiscal services.

But land was cheap relative to land in the middle of town and the location tugged at Hellmann since the first time she laid eyes on Central Oregon.

"I could just see the patients looking out and seeing those beautiful mountains," she recalled. 

On a cold Sunday morning, Sept. 21, 1975, those patients got their first look at Sister Catherine's views and at the newly christened St. Charles Medical Center. It was an all-hands event. Fifty-seven patients were moved one-by-one from St. Charles Memorial Hospital on the hill. A doctor, a nurse, two ambulance crew members and a hospital guild volunteer accompanied each patient. Two-day-old Jason V. of Prineville was the last child born at the old hospital and the first patient moved. That same morning, Calvin M. of Bend became the first child born at the new hospital. By noon, several patients had been treated in the emergency room and two had undergone surgery. The new medical center had 160,000 square feet on four and a half floors. It had 164 patient beds, and the design provided for expansion to 500 beds, according to Hellmann and to a 1972 document. 

Though others credit Sister Catherine's vision, she gave much of the credit to the people of Central Oregon.

"I saw much more community involvement at this hospital that at any other hospital I ever worked at," Hellmann said. "The people of that community were so open to new ideas. I was kind of like a bird out of a cage there."

Today a hotel stands on the rocky knoll across from St. Francis Catholic Church in downtown Bend.

The site stood bare for more than two decades before the hotel opened in 1998. A concrete stairway climbing from Lava Street led to a gravel-strewn knoll. A few remnants of a concrete foundation were the only hints of the past.

Yet people of Bend—old-timers and even recent arrivals—know the site as Hospital Hill. The legacy of St. Charles Hospital and the Sisters of St. Joseph is indelibly etched on the community. For more than a half century—from 1922 to 1975, the sisters operated hospitals on the site. Children born on Hospital Hill grew to give birth to children of their own there.

In 1919, however, the handful of sisters who had taken over the small hospital along Mirror Pond from Drs. Urling Coe and Barnard Ferrell were not thinking about legacies. Their immediate concern was space.

Bend’s population had surged from 523 in 1910 to more than 5,400 by 1920. This boom was fueled by the construction of the massive Brooks-Scanlon and the Shevlin-Hixon lumber mills in 1915. The town had outgrown the hospital.

Father Luke Sheehan, the parish priest at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, purchased five acres across from the church for $1,100 and donated it to the sisters for a hospital. Local contractor E.P. Brosterhous agreed to build the hospital for $29,850. The Mother House in Indiana contributed $19,639 and the sisters paid the balance in seven installments.

Bishop Joseph McGrath and Fathers Luke Sheehan and Gabriel Harrington blessed each room in the building.

The new hospital’s name honored Bishop Charles O’Reilly of the Baker Diocese who had been instrumental in bringing them to Oregon. Gravely ill, he had stepped down from his post and would die a year later. Secondly, it honors the hospital’s patron saint, St. Charles Borromeo. A 16^th century archbishop of Milan, St. Charles was known for his work to help the sick during Europe’s great plague.

Sister Mary Martina was the superior at the time of the move. Sister Mary Agatha was named superior a month later. Then in 1935, Sister Blanche Ress, one of the pioneer sisters who arrived in 1917, became the superior. She would hold that position for 17 years.

The new facility was a vast improvement on the wood-frame building on Bend’s Mirror Pond. Yet, it was Spartan. The sisters slept in the unfinished elevator pit so they could be near their patients. If a patient needed something, he simply banged on the door. By 1923, the diocese built a three-room cottage next to the hospital. The next year brought the construction of a dormitory for them. Bend residents donated $500 to install an electric elevator in 1924.

Though the new hospital saw a small profit in its first year, the sisters lived frugally even by the standards of the day. They tended a garden to help feed themselves. Those not on nursing duty did the hospital’s laundry or cleaned up. Yet, each morning they taught catechism at St. Francis of Assisi after mass.

Bend’s rapid growth soon overwhelmed the 30-bed hospital. A new wing was built in 1934 that added 15 new beds, 10 bassinets, an X-ray department and a chapel.

In 1942, the U.S. Army started developing Camp Abbot on the site of present-day Sunriver Resort. It was a training facility for engineers. Between 1943 and 1944 an estimated 10,000 soldiers would be stationed there.

Needing a place for its sick and injured, the Army built a 25-bed wooden annex at St. Charles Hospital called Prague Hall. The sisters cared for the soldiers. After the war, the government sold the annex to the hospital for $6,000, increasing its bed capacity to 60.

The community’s growth drove expansion on Hospital Hill for the next 30 years, with a completely new hospital in 1951 and additions in 1958 and 1971. When St. Charles moved from the hill in 1975, it had 99 patient rooms and had outgrown the plot of land Father Sheehan provided. The property was sold and the buildings were demolished in 1978. The iron and concrete was gone. The legacy and the name Hospital Hill remain.

Crowded, outdated and struggling, St. Charles Hospital had appealed to the community for help. The evening of March 10, 1948, community leaders responded en masse.

“They had all the churches, all the organizations—about 150 to 200 people up at the old Pilot Butte Inn,” recalled Lowell Jensen a long-time St. Charles board member.

On the table was whether to build a new hospital or add to the existing one and how to pay for either. The Sisters of St. Joseph couldn’t afford a new one at an estimated cost of $1 million. In 1946, they had tried unsuccessfully to sell it to another religious order because of financial troubles. It was up to the citizens of Bend to help what many had begun to regard as “their” hospital. What happened in the following months remains an example of what ordinary citizens could accomplish in a small town.

“The (sisters) were working for free and never really got enough money to go and build anything, so we’d have to go out and raise the money. With that story, it wasn’t hard. The community has always been part of the hospital and still is,” said Pat Metke, another former [Missing copy…(board member?)]

The hospital had run on a meager budget since the sisters assumed operations in 1918. When people couldn’t pay their bills, the sisters would accept farm goods in payment. Some bills were simply forgiven, according to Jensen and Metke, something that holds true even today.

By 1946, crowding had become a problem even with the 25-bed military annex the government had sold the sisters. Bend was surging toward 12,000 people and in 1946 the 60-bed hospital admitted 2,500 patients. That number would hit 3,113 by 1949. In addition, the heating, water and lighting in the old brick building were insufficient.

Sister Blanche, the hospital’s superior, first sought the city’s help. She then asked the Bend Chamber of Commerce to step in. That group made building a new hospital its priority and called the Pilot Butte Inn meeting. From this sprang a group that met each morning to plan strategy. Bend had qualified for aid under the federal Hill-Burton Act of 1946, which provided money to modernize hospitals neglected during the Depression and war.

Robert W. Sawyer, editor and owner of the Bend Bulletin, asked Hardy Myers of the Shevlin-Hixon Company and Morris Hitchcock, owner of Wholesale Bend hardware, to go over the hospital’s finances.

“About the third morning (Myers) hit the table and said ‘by God, I don’t know how that woman has kept the doors open,’” Jensen said, adding delinquent bills were one of the problems. “He said it’s a lot of the people right down here on Wall Street that owe her the money and she can’t collect it from them.”

Myers and Hitchcock collected delinquent payments and suggested a board be formed to handle the hospital’s finances.

“Well, they presented that to Sister Blanche and she was delighted to no end. She said ‘Now we can do what we were sent out here to do: nurse the sick,’” Jensen said.

The Central Oregon Hospitals Foundation formed in April 1948 to oversee the hospital’s finances and to spearhead construction. Sawyer was president and Carl A. Johnson was chairman of the fund-raising campaign. They predicted they could raise the needed money in two weeks, Jensen said. Initially fund-raising was brisk. In addition, the group learned the Sisters of St. Joseph could borrow more than $200,000 toward the project. Then progress stalled, and for several months they were $40,000 short of their goal.

“John Wetle came to our meeting one morning and said ‘I raised the $40,000 last night. I got eight fellows to give $5,000 apiece and take a note from the sisters,’” said Jensen. The men later donated the money.

That fall, the Oregon State Board of Health approved a $309,000 grant of Hill-Burton Act money. Combined with the $344,000 the community raised and about $250,000 the sisters borrowed, the money was enough to build the new St. Charles Memorial Hospital.

On Feb, 1950, the Bend High School band led the community through the slushy streets of downtown to Hospital Hill on Franklin Avenue. The new hospital would be built next to the old brick one on the same site. In the ground-breaking ceremony, Sawyer spoke of when St. Charles would be a regional medical center.

“Over 1,900 persons have contributed to this hospital project. There have been large gifts and small and many in between. Whatever the size, every donor will look up at the building that will stand here and take equal pride that he had a part in it,” Sawyer said.

The new hospital was completed the spring of 1951 and dedicated on a stormy May 12, 1951. Sister Blanche spoke after Sawyer cut the ribbon.

“This ribbon will not be needed, for the doors of St. Charles shall never be locked against anyone in need of services, regardless of rank, color or creed,” Sister Blanche said.

St. Charles Madras is excited to announce that it has completed the third and final phase of its hospital remodel and expansion. Starting Dec. 11, the new main entrance off A Street is open to all patients and visitors.

The third and final phase of the renovation project included expanding the laboratory, enhancing the hospital entrance and parking areas, and connecting the new central registration and waiting area with the older part of the hospital.

“It’s so exciting to finish a project that we promised to the community,” said John Bishop, president of St. Charles Madras and St. Charles Prineville. “The additions and changes we’ve made to our hospital are truly going to enhance the quality and safety of patient care and serve Jefferson County and beyond for many years to come.”

The news media are invited to tour the newly open areas on Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 2 p.m. with Bishop, starting in the new central registration and waiting area.

In 2014, the St. Charles Board of Directors approved the $16 million project, which has added 26,000 square feet to the facility and enhanced outpatient and primary care services. The 25-bed critical access hospital—which serves 21,000 people in Madras and surrounding communities—was built in 1967 and did not meet standards of care when St. Charles acquired it through an asset transfer in 2013. The transaction included a significant infusion of capital into the hospital for the much-needed facility upgrades.

As part of the same project, the St. Charles Madras Emergency Department was expanded and enhanced, and a new surgical suite and Imaging department were constructed, all of which were completed last summer.

“We can all be very proud of this upgraded and renovated hospital, which offers quality health care close to home,” said Mack Gardner, a Madras resident and St. Charles Health System board member. “We can certainly thank those community visionaries back in the mid 1960s and subsequent hospital boards who all laid the ground work for today’s 21st century Madras hospital.”

The Madras community is invited to attend a ribbon cutting ceremony Jan. 12 celebrating the completion of the two-year project. The ceremony will be held in the new central registration and waiting area of St. Charles Madras at 8 a.m.

About St. Charles Health System
St. Charles Health System, Inc., headquartered in Bend, Ore., owns and operates St. Charles Bend, Madras, Prineville and Redmond. It also owns family care clinics in Bend, Madras, Prineville, Redmond and Sisters. St. Charles is a private, not-for-profit Oregon corporation and is the largest employer in Central Oregon with more than 4,200 caregivers. In addition, there are more than 350 active medical staff members and nearly 200 visiting medical staff members who partner with the health system to provide a wide range of care and service to our communities.

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Hospitals care for the sick. Churches care for the soul. But in hard times, the two can clasp hands to catch those tumbling through the gap in the middle. That's what happened during the Great Depression. Lowell Jensen, a former board member of St. Charles, remembered.

"There were 150 to 200 people riding the rails going north and going south looking for work and getting with their families to try to live," Jensen said. "I remember then what that hospital did. It was Father Luke Sheehan, of course."

At the height of the Depression, the area along Franklin Avenue between the railroad tracks and present-day Third Street was undeveloped. People riding the rails camped there. The good father took pity.

"They put a sign up there that they could get food at St. Charles Hospital, and of course, some of them would filter down into town," Jensen said. "Then the Chamber of Commerce came to Father Luke and said they wanted to take that sign down.

"Father Luke said, 'You leave that sign up. They're not bums, they're people who need help.' And so he said they were going to feed them as long as they're hungry. You'd see 30, 40, sometimes 50 people lined up every morning."

The sisters of St. Charles Hospital served meals through the Depression.

Tucked between the mountains and the high desert, Bend in 1918 lay hidden from much of the outside world.

But isolation wouldn’t be enough to shield the booming lumber town from the Spanish influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 20 to 40 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1919. By some accounts, the toll from the fast-killing illness surpassed even the “Black Death” plaque of 1347-1351, making it the worst epidemic in history.

It would be the first big test for the newly arrived nuns of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton, Indiana, and the little Bend hospital they had taken over. Before the end of the year, the hospital would overflow with flu victims and the community would press the Bend Amateur Athletic Club (now the Boys and Girls Club) into service as a temporary hospital.

Among the victims in Central Oregon was Bend mayor, S.C. Caldwell, who died Jan. 8, 1919, while in Vancouver, Wash., the Bend Bulletin reported.

The deadly virus cropped up during the final year of World War I. It first showed up in Asia and Europe, picking up the name Spanish flu because it allegedly killed 8 million people there in May 1918.

The war, with its massive movements of men, helped spread the virus around the globe. The virus moved rapidly throughout developed nations wherever rail lines carried people. It first appeared in the United States among soldiers at a Kansas Army base in March 1918, but didn’t hit with full force until autumn.

In Central Oregon, 44 Deschutes County residents died out of 174 document cases in 1918, according to the Annual Reports of the Oregon State Board of Health. That same year, Crook County lost seven people out of 100 cases and Jefferson County saw two deaths from 64 cases. In 1919, 14 people died in Deschutes County, three in Crook and one in Jefferson.

The fall of 1918, the Bend Bulletin issued a call for volunteers to help at the makeshift hospital and with homebound illness around town. According to a 1917 business directory, Bend had seven physicians. They, along with the five Sisters of St. Joseph couldn’t keep up. On Nov. 11, 1918, the paper reported, “Spanish influenza cases are being treated at the emergency hospital, over 30 cases being reported at the institution this morning. Although the help situation is somewhat improved over last week, there is still a shortage and more men and women are being appealed to to give their time in aiding to care for the patients who are already there.”

Besides a shortage of beds and medical personnel, they had no proper medicine to relieve patients.

“The only drugs available were quinine, camphorated oil and moonshine whiskey,” recalled Jim Donovan, who managed Lumbermans Hospital in Bend after the sisters took over the Bend Hospital.

Yet Donovan saw a bright side amid the illness and grief, calling it “one of my most heartwarming experiences because of the help given by the community in caring for those seriously ill.”

Among those who helped were Bend Bulletin publisher Robert Sawyer and Kathleen Rockwell, both of whom were early benefactors of St. Charles Hospital. Rockwell was better known as Klondike Kate, a famous dance hall girl who moved to Bend after entertaining miners in the Yukon Territory during the gold rush of 1897.

The square clapboard house at 81 Oregon Street fit only a few patients. Surgery was done in the kitchen. Its only nurse lived in half the tiny building with her husband and five kids.

But in 1908 when George and Fern Hall moved to Bend, there was nothing resembling even a clinic. The town’s only doctor, Urling Coe, MD, ran his practice from a buggy and a few hand bags.

Yet Mrs. Hall’s little hospital was a seed from which St. Charles Health System grew. A handful of other small hospitals came and went through the first half of the 1900s. None, however, left the same legacy.

Fern Hall wasn’t a school-trained nurse. She had no degrees or certificates. She learned her profession on the job, becoming what was called a practical nurse. In Coe’s memoir, “Frontier Doctor: Observations on Central Oregon and the Changing West,” he writes she was perfect for the job.

“She was one of those rare individuals born to be a nurse: energetic, hard-working, sweet-tempered, levelheaded and kind-hearted, and she loved nursing,” Coe wrote.

Between epidemics of typhoid fever, a baby boom and many grisly injuries, the demands were more than one man with a medical bag and a horse could handle.

“We did not have all of the equipment that even a small hospital should have, but Mrs. Hall knew how to get along with little, and her whole heart and soul were in the work, and that is what counts,” Coe wrote.

In the spring of 1909, Dr. Barnard Ferrell, joined Coe in practice and worked in Hall’s hospital. Bend quickly outgrew the hospital. When Hall moved to Portland in 1914, Coe and Ferrell took it over. They moved the hospital to a remodeled house at 930 Broadway, now called Brooks Street. On April 15, 1915, the Bend Bulletin reported on the new hospital. The story made a comment without elaboration about the future.

“It is understood that arrangements are being made to have one of the nursing orders of the Catholic Church establish a branch here and that when this is done the hospital will be turned over to the sisters for operation,” the paper reported.