It’s a man-bites-dog news story. Fort Scott announced Monday that it will once again have a hospital.
The welcome news bucks a 20-year trend of shuttering rural hospitals. Since 2005, almost 200 rural communities in the United States — nine in Kansas — have lost their hospitals due to flagging profit margins.
Fort Scott’s Mercy Hospital closed in December 2018.
Sweeping in to save the day is Noble Health Corp., a small Kansas City-based non-profit formed in 2019 that also owns hospitals in Fulton and Mexico, Mo. Like Fort Scott’s, the Missouri hospitals were operating beyond their means.
MAKING it all happen were Bourbon and Fort Scott officials.
When Noble Health said last June a feasibility study was necessary to determine whether the Fort Scott area could support an acute care hospital, the county contributed $800,000 and the city $200,000 to the study.
And now that the results are favorable, county officials say they will fork over at least another $2 million to help finance the transition.
The Noble Health Bourbon County Community Hospital will hire about 100 employees when it opens in 2023. That’s a $6.5 million payroll right there.
So yes, that $3 million investment will be recouped in short order by having a multi-million dollar business back online.
It’s also important to note that a hospital is a key recruitment tool to prospective manufacturers and industries.
SINCE MERCY’S closing, city officials have done a great job in seeing their 7,800 citizens continue to receive health care.
With only a 90-day advance notice of Mercy closing, Ascension Via Christi out of Pittsburg was contracted to keep the hospital’s emergency room running and the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas set up shop in another part of the hospital. Those leases expire in December.
For CHCSEK, the experience has been so positive it is now building a new clinic in Fort Scott at the site of the former Price Chopper grocery store on South Main Street.
Fort Scott Community College also took advantage of the hospital’s vacated space and is leasing the western part for student housing.
IT’S SAFE to say Noble Health would have had only a passing interest in Fort Scott had local officials held back.
