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By Dick Broom
Twenty years ago, when David
Cowherd, M.D., performed the first
cardiac catheterization procedure at
Moore Regional Hospital, who but the
most visionary could have imagined
today’s capacity for diagnosing and
treating blocked coronary arteries?
Four years later, when John Krahnert, M.D., began
performing heart bypass surgery at the hospital, did
anyone foresee that within a decade Moore Regional
would be known as one of the leading heart care centers
in the state?
The quality of those fledgling programs, made possible
by generous community support, led to their early
success and brought rapid growth.
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That growth has accelerated even faster as the populations of Moore and surrounding counties have grown and as people have learned they no longer have to drive to Charlotte or
the Triangle for state-of-the-art heart care.
To maintain the high level of excellence and to keep
up with—or rather, to stay ahead of—the community’s
ever-growing need for advanced heart services,
FirstHealth plans to build a comprehensive Heart
Hospital at Moore Regional.
The campaign that Moore Regional Foundation has launched to
help achieve that goal will also make possible a Hospice Residence for
patients who otherwise would have to be admitted to the hospital and
a Hospitality House for patients’ families. Because every donation will
bring the hospital one step closer to building these much-needed facilities,
the campaign is called Stepping Stones.
A hospital for the heart
As the Community Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center did
for Moore Regional’s cancer services a few years ago, the new Heart
Hospital will bring together all of its diagnostic and treatment services
for heart patients. That means, as Dr. Cowherd puts it, “We won’t be
running from one end of the hospital to the other trying to do all the
different things we do.”
 The Heart Hospital will be built near Moore Regional’s outpatient
entrance on Page Road. It will have its own operating rooms, catheterization
and angioplasty suites, intensive care units and regular patient
rooms. This consolidation of facilities will mean that patients with
various heart-related problems can be treated in one place by medical
cardiologists, interventional cardiologists and cardiac surgeons.
According to Dr. Krahnert, the new hospital is crucial to the future
of heart surgery at Moore Regional.
“We now provide first-rate cardiac surgery, because we have wonderful
technology and surgical teams with extraordinary expertise,
but our physical facilities are starting to lag behind,” he says. “With a
comprehensive cardiac care center, I think we will be able to take our
expertise to an even higher level.”
Patrick Simpson, M.D., a medical cardiologist, says, “It’s very exciting
to know that, no matter what technology comes over the horizon,
we will be able to take advantage of it.”
Charles Frock, CEO of FirstHealth of the Carolinas, says construction
of the Heart Hospital will benefit more than heart patients and
those who care for them.
“Areas of the hospital that are now occupied by the cardiovascular
services can be reconfigured to allow other patient care services to
grow and flourish,” he says. “So this campaign is really an effort to
bring the entire Moore Regional campus up to the highest possible
level.”
A “home” for Hospice patients
Hospice is all about enabling people with life-limiting illnesses to
spend the end of their lives at home. The Hospice staff and volunteers
do this by helping family members provide whatever care the patient
needs. But sometimes patients have to be admitted to the hospital if
pain, nausea or other symptoms can’t be adequately managed at home.
Once the new Hospice Residence is built, most patients will be able
to go there instead. Or, if they are being discharged from the hospital,
they might go to the Hospice Residence for a few days while their
family is getting ready to care for them at home.
“We will have 11 inpatient rooms furnished and decorated like regular
bedrooms,” says Charlotte Patterson, R.N., director of FirstHealth
Hospice & Palliative Care. “It won’t look like a nursing facility or hospital,
but patients will receive the same care they would receive in the
hospital.”
The Hospice Residence will have a large living room and smaller
rooms where families can gather, a kitchen and dining area, a small
chapel and a children’s playroom. It will be surrounded by gardens
with walking paths.
“The Hospice Residence is a dream that has been a long time coming,”
Patterson says. “It’s exciting to think that we might soon be building
it.”
Hospitality House for families
When someone is in the hospital for a heart procedure, cancer treatment
or some other type of care, where does that patient’s family stay?
If family members live nearby, they can visit the hospital during the
day and go home at night. If they have traveled a long distance, they
might check into a local hotel, provided they can afford it.
An architectural rendering of the Hospitality House
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But family members often want to be as close to their loved one as
possible, so they end up sitting in waiting rooms for hours on end and
sometimes even sleep there. Or they curl up and nap in a chair in the
patient’s room. They go for days without sleeping well, resting well or
eating well, and that isn’t good for themselves or their loved one.
The Hospitality House, to be built in FirstVillage across Memorial
Drive from the main hospital entrance, will provide families with a
quiet, comfortable place to spend the night or simply to rest for a few
hours. The house also will welcome patients from outside the immediate
area who need to be at the hospital for outpatient treatments two or
three days in a row.
Getting there step by step
The Stepping Stones Campaign, with its $25 million goal, is the
largest fundraising effort that the Foundation of FirstHealth has ever
undertaken.
“It’s awfully ambitious, but it’s also awfully important,” Frock says. “It
will allow us to provide better and more comprehensive services for our
patients and the community.”
While the ultimate goal of any capital campaign is to raise money,
that isn’t the only goal of Stepping Stones, says John Ellis, M.D., chairman
of the Stepping Stones Campaign Steering Committee.
“We see it as an opportunity to educate people about the hospital,
about the role it has played in the community and the role the community
has played in its quality and success through the years,” he says.
“We hope people will understand how special this hospital has been, is
now and, with their help, can be in the future.”
The “Stepping
Stones” family
If the community responds to the Stepping
Stones Campaign with as much enthusiasm
as Moore Regional Hospital’s medical staff,
FirstHealth employees and board members,
and the Moore Regional Hospital Auxiliary,
then the $25 million goal is well within reach.
Already, FirstHealth employees have all but
achieved the $1 million goal that campaign leaders
set for them. Every member of the organization’s
Leadership Council, which includes all department
heads, has signed on.
Meanwhile, Moore Regional’s 192-member medical
staff has set a record for giving.
“We have already had a much higher rate of
giving by our physicians than ever before,” says
FirstHealth CEO Charles Frock. “I think that is a reflection
of their close relationship with the hospital and
of their knowing how important these new facilities
will be for the community.”
Several physician practices have achieved 100 percent
participation, and participation by at least 90
percent of the medical staff seems likely.
Kathleen Westover, president of the Foundation of
FirstHealth, says it is significant that, while physicians
are not hospital employees and maintain very busy
schedules managing their own patient practices, “so
many of them are willing to help build facilities and
expand services by giving philanthropically and by
spending time encouraging others to do the same.”
The Moore Regional Hospital Auxiliary has
pledged $1 million to support the Heart Hospital,
Hospice Residence and Hospitality House. Given the
Auxiliary’s history of support, that money is as good
as in the bank. “We are excited that there are a
number of projects we can support that will touch
the lives of so many people,” says Auxiliary President
Rebecca Cummings.
Most of the money that the Auxiliary gives comes
from the Moore Regional Hospital Gift Shop and
vending machine sales and through special events,
the largest being the annual Holiday Ball. This year’s
event is scheduled for Friday, Dec. 8.
When FirstHealth begins reaching out to people in
the community in the next few months and asking
them to join the Stepping Stones Campaign, Frock
says, “It will be nice to be able to tell them how
enthusiastically those of us within the FirstHealth
family have already responded.” |
A history of philanthropy
The Stepping Stones Campaign continues a tradition
that goes back to the earliest days of the hospital in
Pinehurst. It is the tradition of calling on the community
to help build the facilities needed for expanding
and updating patient care services and raising them
to a higher level of excellence.
Time after time, the community has responded with generosity.
“If you look at the history of the hospital, it is clear that it has
enjoyed a special relationship with the community all along,”
says John Ellis, M.D., chair of the Stepping Stones Campaign
Steering Committee. “Every time the hospital was in need or
took on a new vision, the community has always been there to
support that vision.”
Over the years, practically every new building, every new piece
of expensive equipment and every new clinical service has been
made possible by compassionate donors. Sometimes, the hospital
didn’t even have to ask.
The first pediatrics unit, which opened in 1952, was furnished
with a memorial gift of $55,000 from the family of C.
Louis Meyer.
When Samuel Allen died in 1956, he left the hospital a
$100,000 endowment to help cover operating expenses, “especially
in connection with the care of worthy charity cases.”
In the mid-1960s, Mr. and Mrs. Walter G. Robins donated
$150,000 toward a new intensive care unit.
Emilie “Jo” Roberts raised $130,000 to help establish the
Radiation Therapy department by selling watches for many years
in the hospital lobby and at the Pinehurst Hotel.
The Moore Regional Hospital Auxiliary has raised close to
$4 million to help build facilities, buy medical equipment,
award nursing scholarships and provide for special needs
of patients and their families. The Auxiliary was formed
in 1930 when 26 local women came together to “lend a
hand” to the Moore County Hospital, which had opened the
year before. The support of the Auxiliary and of individual
donors in the community allowed the hospital to survive the
Depression and to flourish in the decades that followed.
In just the last 10 years, the Auxiliary has given $1 million to
help enlarge and renovate the Child Development Center, a child
care center for the children of FirstHealth employees, and $1 million
for the “In Love and Service” Capital Campaign that included
a new outpatient department and a Community Hospital
Comprehensive Cancer Center for the hospital.
Most gifts to the hospital and, more recently, to FirstHealth
have been small by comparison, but together they have totaled
many millions. Financial support has come in the form of cash,
stock, challenge grants, charitable remainder trusts, bequests and
memorial gifts.
From the will of H. Arnold Jackson: In May 1941, my
son, Harley Jackson, died as the result of an automobile
accident. Although he had volunteered for service in the
Army Air Corps, he had not been accepted due to defective
vision.
In July 1943, my son, Sheldon Jackson, who was a
Lieutenant and Combat Pilot in the United States Army Air
Corps, died in the service of his country.
In memory of our sons, my wife and I have contributed to
the Moore Memorial Hospital … funds for the construction,
equipping, furnishing and decorating of the Emergency
Services Department.
After giving $50,000 and then another $100,000 for the
Emergency Department, Arnold and Katherine Jackson continued
to give. In 1978, their gifts, which then exceeded $1 million,
were used to create the Harley and Sheldon Jackson Memorial
Fund.
Through wise investment by the Moore Regional Hospital
Foundation, the $1 million fund grew to $6 million, even with
disbursements through the years for equipment and renovations.
Even after a $5 million disbursement for the latest Emergency
Department expansion, the Jackson Fund still had $1 million.
“The Jackson Fund is a wonderful example of how the money
that people give can, with careful stewardship, be a perpetual
source of support for strengthening the hospital’s ability to care
for people,” says Robin Cummings, M.D., chairman of the Moore
Regional Hospital Foundation Board.
“Some people have the impression that, if they give $100,
we immediately go out and spend it. But, in many cases, unless
the donor specifies otherwise, we invest it so that it grows and
increases in power.” |
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