Lourdes Health and Trios Health: Dedicated to ‘Making Communities Healthier’

This last year was anything but easy, but we want to start out by thanking our providers, nurses, staff and essential workers at Lourdes and Trios for stepping up in the face of what felt impossible and for their compassion, positive attitudes, endurance, and preparation during these difficult circumstances.

We are grateful to our employees for coming to work each day, working on the frontlines and persevering through these unprecedented times. Their dedication to patient care is inspiring, and we are filled with appreciation and gratitude for all they have done and their ongoing dedication to Making Communities Healthier®.

When we first started hearing about a novel coronavirus at the end of 2019, our teams began preparations before the virus was known to be in Washington state and the rest of the country. Our materials teams prepared with extra orders of PPE, our nurses and providers were trained on what to expect, and our emergency preparedness committees planned for exigent and surge circumstances. This preparation greatly helped in our response to COVID-19.

Even with the difficulties presented in 2020, we are pleased to report great progress and growth at both Lourdes and Trios. We continue to grow our working relationship and partner together in our shared mission of Making Communities Healthier®. We are constantly looking at ways we can best serve the needs of our community together, leverage the strengths of our organizations and work cooperatively to provide healthcare.

Last year, we added two new providers at Lourdes in Cardiology and Rheumatology. At Trios, we added 15 new providers in Anesthesiology, Family Medicine, Hospital Medicine, Internal Medicine, Interventional Pain Medicine, Urgent Care and Urology. This is in addition to the 11 providers we added across both organizations in 2019. We are excited to provide additional access to these services for our patients and the community and continue to recruit talented providers in order to provide greater access and services.

As the pandemic continues, the use of telehealth is critical to continue assisting our patients. We offer two types of virtual visits: telephonic, a simple check-in with your provider over the phone; and televideo, a face-to-face visit with your provider using video conferencing as a means for patients to not delay seeking care.

We have also recently added online scheduling options for many of our providers, including for urgent care visits. Through our websites, patients can schedule an urgent care visit up to 24 hours in advance and then show up at their scheduled time to be seen by a provider, without having to wait in line. This is an exciting change, and we hope it is one that is beneficial and useful for our patients.

At Trios, we were pleased to open a full-service outpatient laboratory at the Trios Care Center at Southridge. We have seen a huge uptick in the utilization of our laboratory services since this move, and our Trios Medical Group providers are now able to refer their patients for outpatient testing to this lab site. This has been very convenient for patients, especially when being seen at the Southridge Care Center.

Trios Therapy Services also saw large growth in 2020, with the re-opening of occupational, speech, and physical therapies. These services add to the cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation that we already offered and meet service gaps that existed in our community. Trios Therapy Services is able to serve patients of all ages and is conveniently located in the Southridge Care Center, adding to the growing list of services our patients are able to access in one location.

We had been planning for this re-opening for some time and were grateful that even in the midst of a pandemic, we were able to launch these services, bring on a team of skilled therapists and further meet the needs of our community.

At Lourdes, we were honored to be Washington State’s Most Recognized Hospital for Orthopedics in 2020 by Healthgrades. We received several awards from Healthgrades, including American’s 100 Best Hospitals for Spine Surgery™; the Orthopedic Surgery Excellence Award™ for 5 Years in a Row (2016-20); top 10% in the Nation for Overall Orthopedic Services for 5 Years in a Row (2016-20); and the Spine Surgery Excellence Award™ in 2020.

Additionally, we were recognized with 5-Star Awards in Total Hip Replacement, Hip Fracture Treatment, Back Surgery and Spinal Fusion Surgery. We are extremely proud of these achievements and could not be prouder of the Lourdes surgical team and our orthopedic partners who have made it possible to receive this level of recognition.

Lourdes Counseling Center offers the only inpatient hospital in the region that provides inpatient mental health services and outpatient behavioral health services. The Lourdes Mental Health Mobile Outreach Team continues to partner with local law enforcement agencies to help individuals experiencing behavioral health crises by stabilizing an immediate crisis, assisting people in obtaining the help they need, de-escalating crisis interventions and reducing arrests.

We are proud of the multi-disciplinary effort from this team to achieve positive outcomes, interventions and services for those who they serve and for the professionalism in which they conduct themselves in their duties and responsibilities.

Finally, both of our organizations are excited that construction has begun on the new Family Birthing Center addition at Trios Southridge Hospital. We are grateful for the investment in our community from our parent company, LifePoint Health, of nearly $22 million to make this project happen and relocate the birthing center to a growing area in Kennewick. This will allow patients to access all of our hospital services in one place and bring greater support for patients and staff as we move to one site. It is anticipated that construction will be complete and the new birthing center open to the public in the second quarter of 2022.

As we look to the rest of 2021 and beyond, we are grateful to be able to serve our community and for the continued trust and support you put in us for your healthcare needs.

This story was originally published April 30, 2021 at 12:37 AM with the headline "Lourdes Health and Trios Health: Dedicated to ‘Making Communities Healthier’."