Lourdes and Trios Health: Working together to serve the community

Editor’s note: This article was written before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many people are curious to know how Lourdes and Trios are doing. It is a question both of us get asked often when we’re out in the community.

It has been almost two years since Trios Health and Lourdes Health were acquired by RCCH Healthcare Partners in Tennessee, which set our organizations on our path toward collaboration and meeting healthcare needs in and around the Tri-Cities. Not long after we became RCCH hospitals, RCCH merged with LifePoint Health, also in Tennessee.

We are pleased to have now been LifePoint hospitals for more than a year and to be able to work with them. Their team members have visited our facilities several times and are excited about what they see here: devoted and committed teams working hard for the betterment of this community, the potential for growth in services and competent and skilled healthcare providers.

We are grateful to be able to work together to serve this community. Every day we are working to fulfill our mission of Making Communities Healthier. Our collaboration allows us to leverage our strengths and work hard every day to meet the needs our growing community. We believe we are stronger together and that the community with benefit greatly as we grow our services together and work cooperatively to provide healthcare.

In 2019, we were fortunate to be able to add seven providers to Trios Health. These providers are in gastroenterology, hospital medicine, family medicine, neurosurgery and pediatrics. On the Lourdes side, we added four providers in general surgery, pediatrics, urgent care and family practice/women’s health. All of them are talented providers who are already making a difference at Lourdes and Trios and in our community.

And we continue to add new providers. We have several more new providers under contract or in the process of coming on board. These providers will be able to help us provide new services and help even more people. We are continuing to recruit and hope to be able to add more talented providers in the months and years to come.

Just as we’ve added more providers, we’ve also looked at services we can add or bring back. We’re pleased to be bringing back outpatient therapy services later this year at Trios, including physical, occupational and speech therapy. These services will be provided at our Care Center at Southridge. At both Lourdes and Trios, we recently acquired new technology in the field of robotic guidance and navigation for spinal surgery.

This platform technology is designed to improve safety and accuracy within the operating room, provide improved visualization of patient anatomy to help optimize patient treatment and streamline the surgical workflow and reduce radiation exposure to surgeons and staff. This revolutionary robotic navigation platform is the world’s first technology to combine a rigid robotic arm and full navigation capabilities into one adaptable platform for accurate trajectory alignment in spine surgery.

At Lourdes, we were thrilled to be Washington’s most recognized hospital for orthopedics, to be named among America’s 100 Best Hospitals for Spine Surgery and to have received the Orthopedic Surgery Excellence Award by Healthgrades. Additionally, we received awards for back surgery, hip fracture treatment, total hip replacement, spinal fusion and appendectomy. We’re grateful for our surgical team and orthopedic partners who made this possible!

At Trios, our Southridge hospital was named LifeNet Health’s Operating Room of the Year for tissue recoveries and donations. We also received the Get With the Guidelines Stroke Gold Plus/Target Stroke Award for our timely identification and treatment of stroke patients. And Trios Women’s and Children’s Hospital earned a Patient Safety Excellence Award from Healthgrades for providing excellence in patient safety by preventing infections, medical errors and other preventable complications based on 14 serious, potentially preventable adverse events.

We remain committed to serving this community together. Lourdes will continue to lead the community in provision of behavioral health services. Our Mobile Outreach grant has been extended, and we are adding a night shift to the outreach program. We will continue to reduce stigma around caring for mental health through integration into annual wellness checks with primary care providers.

Trios will continue to provide Camp Trios in the summer for children with Type 1 Diabetes. This camp has been an amazing resource for families and children, and we remain committed to providing this service. Together, we plan to offer what was formerly Trios’ annual sports physicals in May for students in grades 7-12, and we are jointly planning a women’s healthcare event for this spring as well.

You’ll see Trios and Lourdes together at several events. We plan to remain committed partners and use our relationship and resources to better meet the healthcare needs of this community. In working together, we hope to provide expanded services and accessibility and a continued investment in our community through the recruitment and development of new providers, implementation of new technology and creation of new community outreach opportunities.

So if you’re wondering how Lourdes and Trios are doing, we’re doing great! It’s a new day for us, and we are grateful to be able to serve you and are looking forward to all that’s to come for us and this great community!

This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Lourdes and Trios Health: Working together to serve the community."