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KVH Urgent Care moves to new location

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KVH Urgent Care – Cle Elum is moving to their new location on Monday, January 8, 2018.  In order to provide uninterrupted coverage for our patients services will cease at their current location at 201 Alpha Way in Cle Elum at 10:00 p.m. on January 7 and will resume at 10:00 a.m. on January 8 at 214 W. 1st Street in downtown Cle Elum.

The Urgent Care clinic’s new location is in the building that previously held Swedish Cle Elum Primary Care.  The building on 1st Street will provide a location that is better suited for an urgent care facility.  The move is part of an agreement between Kittitas County Public Hospital District No. 2, Kittitas Valley Healthcare, and Swedish Health Services that will allow for greater collaboration between upper county medical resources and an expansion of services to the community.

The move will allow Swedish Health Services to relocate to the Alpha Way clinic, where it will operate adjacent to KVH Family Medicine – Cle Elum. The Alpha Way building is owned by Hospital District 2 and leased by Kittitas Valley Healthcare.

Swedish is preparing the site to host both on-site and telehealth services in the spring of 2018, while also evaluating area needs, and availability of Swedish and other specialty care providers.  We expect the Swedish presence at the site to evolve over the coming months and years.

KVH Urgent Care – Cle Elum will maintain its current daily hours of 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and increase staffing levels to handle non-emergent items such as earaches, fevers, minor allergic reactions, and simple fractures.  In cases of emergency, the public should call 911.

The public is invited to tour the new facility and meet the staff during an open house at the new location on Friday, February 2 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

For more information about KVH Urgent Care – Cle Elum, call (509) 674-6944.

Jim Pappas

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Jim Pappas

From minor injuries to the most painful day of his life, retired Central Washington University administrator and professor Jim Pappas has relied on KVH Hospital for quality care and outstanding compassion.

He’s seen both up close and personal. Case in point: what happened when Pappas’s wife Denise fell critically ill.

The love of his life and the heart of her family, Denise was also afraid of doctors – so fearful that for several years she ignored symptoms of potential heart problems, repeatedly refusing pleas from her family to see a doctor.

Flash back to May 19, 2006. Unable to shake persistent shoulder and back pain that eventually spread to her chest and legs, and with her husband begging her to go to the hospital, Denise refused — right up until 11:30 p.m. when Pappas called 911. “I know now,” he says, “that she was dying before my eyes.”

Paramedics put her in the medic unit. Alarmed when he saw them struggling to get a heartbeat, Pappas walked circles in the front yard until the ambulance pulled away, then drove himself to KVH. Relief mingled with fear, he says. “I was so scared. But I thought she would finally get the help she needed.”

At the hospital, Pappas sat beside his unresponsive wife, holding her hand and talking to her as medical staff tried to restart her heart with defibrillation multiple times. The effort failed. “They did everything they could. They were just outstanding but Denise passed away in ER,” he says.

She was 67. They had been married 42 years. Stunned and numb with grief on what he calls “the worst day of my life,” Pappas sat beside her waiting for family to arrive, a nurse and doctor at his side until a pastor came in. “They didn’t leave me alone,” he says.

It’s not the only time Pappas has witnessed a level of care – and caring – that he finds unforgettable.

When a longtime friend dying of cancer was hospitalized, Pappas was a regular visitor – so regular, he says with a smile, that some staff assumed he was a son.  The 97-year-old patient and his 94-year-old wife had been married 73 years. “What I saw was that everybody who came in, the guys as well as the gals, took time to talk to her,” says Pappas who at 77 is a walking testimonial to a hospital he believes in.

There’s good reason. Since arriving in Ellensburg from Chicago in 1980, he’s turned to KVH for care on multiple occasions. There was treatment for diverticulitis, emergency room visits for a fish hook that got stuck in his hand and a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, treatment for a stomach ulcer and bacterial infection, endoscopies, colonoscopies, MRIs and X-rays, rotator cuff surgery and surgeries on his fingers and both knees.

“Dr. Dan Hiersche (an orthopedic specialist) repaired me so many times,” says Pappas who lauds a host of other providers. Among them: his longtime primary care physician Dr. Don Solberg whom he calls “cerebral and a straightforward professional with good bedside manners.”

Nurses consistently have been “absolutely professional and caring, showing interest in me, explaining what they were doing but most importantly answering my questions,” he adds.

While some people may think they’ll find better care at a bigger hospital, Pappas says, he’s found everything he’s needed in a comforting high quality setting close to home. “This hospital has served me well,” he says. “They identify what the problem is, address it, operate if they need to and you get it fixed. I’ve been very pleased.”

New Facility Plan Emerges from 2018-2020 Strategic Plan

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Recent strategic planning and two recent property purchases have KVH adjusting its 2016 master site facilities plan.  In mid-2017, KVH purchased the 22,000 square foot former Royal Vista skilled nursing facility. More recently, the public hospital district acquired the 36,000 square foot three-story building near Super 1 and Rite Aid.

The KVH Board of Commissioners devoted much of 2017 to developing a new strategic plan for the hospital district.  Access to care and community engagement surfaced as key strategic initiatives and the emerging facility plan flowed naturally from that focus on patient and community needs. 

The new facility plan is about much more than bricks and mortar; it focuses on improving care processes, consolidating the electronic health record as well as identifying new space for patient services.  With these purchases, KVH is able to take advantage of existing community property and to expand more quickly than building new.  “Access to care cannot wait for a new building,” said KVH CEO Julie Petersen.  It will ultimately provide more square footage at a fraction of the cost estimated for previous plans.

“Recent provider recruitment has been so successful that we do not have adequate space for our incoming providers,” said Petersen.  “We have reached the point where our facilities are the limiting factor in being able to care for our community.”

Occupation and expansion into the newly acquired facilities will be staggered as space becomes ready for use, and after KVH implements a new integrated electronic health record that will better consolidate patient health information.

The former Royal Vista facility, now called the KVH Radio Hill Annex, was purchased in mid-2017. This property is located in a residential neighborhood and is most appropriate for low-traffic support services. On November 30, KVH received approval from the City of Ellensburg to begin relocating services to the facility. Home health, hospice, patient billing, and other support functions that are currently located in the KVH 309 Annex at 309 E Mountain View Avenue will be the first to move to the Radio Hill Annex. KVH hopes to invite community partners to consider co-locating at the Radio Hill Annex to create a community health resource center. This would include some external partners such as Hospice Friends. 

Vacating the 309 Annex will free up space that is ready to accommodate higher-traffic professional services.  This is an ideal location for clinical services.

The acquisition of the three-story building near Super 1 and Rite Aid was finalized on December 11.  This building will be known as the KVH Medical Arts Center.  Currently, the building is almost completely occupied so no immediate changes are anticipated.  In the future, KVH will move some of its existing and emerging clinical services into the building, in addition to the current provider tenants.  The Board believes that practicing in such close proximity to other area healthcare providers will foster collaboration and ultimately benefit the patients.

This is in line with the vision that Dr. Byron Haney had when he began construction of the building in 2007.  “Our purpose was to retain and expand in town medical specialty care, expand Family Health Care of Ellensburg, offer KVH or DSHS services in a consolidated location and leave room for future healthcare growth. This summer KVH approached me with a desire to acquire this building for their needed expansion. Knowing our initial vision for this community had been realized, we granted KVH their request. We trust this building will bless this community for years to come.” said Dr. Byron Haney, founding physician of Family Health Care of Ellensburg.”

Though decisions have not been made about which services will be moved to the locations suitable for high-traffic professional services, the facilities planning work completed in 2016 will largely be translated to these new locations.

Mike Knutson

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He’d suffered life-threatening injuries in a crushing accident. When Mike Knutson woke up at Harborview Medical Center after ten hours of surgery and four days of being unconscious, he thanked the physician who saved his life – and got an unexpected answer.

Actually, the surgeon said, the first place that saved his life was the place he came from – the emergency room at KVH Hospital.

Flash back to the afternoon of February 6, 2017 when then 58-year-old Knutson, who lives in the Manastash, was injured. With a broken scapula and clavicle, a collapsed right lung and fifteen broken ribs, six of them broken at both ends so they weren’t attached in his chest, Knutson found himself reeling from pain and struggling to breathe.

“I couldn’t lay down,” he says. “I was on my hands and knees. It was the only way I could breathe.”

Medics from Kittitas Valley Fire and Rescue responded, treated him at the scene and rushed him to KVH Hospital where a real-life emergency room drama was about to unfold.

Notified en route of Knutson’s injuries, the hospital activated a full trauma response, summoning a coordinated trauma response team – including a respiratory therapist, additional nursing staff, and staff from laboratory, radiology and pharmacy– to the emergency department.

Dr. Frank Smith, the on-call surgeon that day, was waiting when Knutson arrived. Dede Utley, director of emergency services at KVH, was in the emergency department giving a tour to two board members, and witnessed what came next.

With Knutson sedated, tests and x-rays were done and a tube was placed in his chest to remove blood pooling around his collapsed lung. Immediately recognizing that Knutson needed a higher level of care than KVH could offer, staff began coordinating his transfer to Harborview, the only Level I trauma center in Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. Other staff were busy notifying and updating Knutson’s family.

When Knutson continued to struggle to breathe, a decision was made to intubate him and put him on a ventilator for the transfer to Harborview. Utley said one of the paramedics did the intubation under the supervision of a doctor.

Two days after he was crushed, Knutson underwent surgery at Harborview to have titanium straps placed on his ribs to hold them in place. Two weeks later he came home to Ellensburg where a friend spent several weeks caring for him.

Mike Knutson

Knutson is not a man who takes gratitude lightly. Two weeks after he got home, he stopped by KVFR to thank the paramedics who saved him. “Oh,” one of them said, “I didn’t expect to see you again.” Then, Knutson went to the KVH emergency department to say thank you there. How close he came to death isn’t lost on him.

“It’s a miracle,” he says. “I have to believe the Lord had a hand in this. There’s a couple or three times I could have cashed ‘er in. Things had to happen in the right way for me to survive.

“There’s the EMTs who knew exactly how to handle me. There’s the emergency room where they knew exactly what they were doing, placed the tube in my lung and got me to exactly where I needed to be. There’s the docs at Harborview who did the surgery on my ribs.

“The right people where there at the right time.”

Knutson, who worked as a tugboat builder and designer for 24 years and now owns a crane company in Kittitas County, hopes to return to work soon but says doctors have told him he may never fully recover.

While no one likes to see a serious trauma injury, Utley says what transpired in the KVH emergency department that day showcased how good it is. “I’m proud of how this event went,” she says. “We stabilized him and got him ready to go to Harborview. It worked exactly the way it was supposed to work.”

As for Knutson, he’s impressed. “KVH might be a small hospital but it’s a good hospital,” he says. “People don’t understand how good it is. They did a good job – and I’m alive because of it.”

Sal Camargo

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Sal Camargo

He hails from a small town in rural Mexico, a place where opportunities are few and dreams limited. But long before KVH Hospital pharmacist Salvador (Sal) Camargo ever considered a pharmacy career,  his father Salvador and his mother Carmen were teaching lessons that would pave the way. Among them: Work hard – and get an education.

The first was taught by example; the second came as advice.

“In Mexico we were very poor,” Sal says. “My father had a second grade education and took various jobs to help his parents, from herding cows to working in the corn fields.” To forge a better future, the elder Camargo came to the U.S. and became a seasonal crop worker, earned legal residency and eventually brought his wife and two young sons, Sal, then two and a half, and Adán, a year younger, to the Wenatchee area.

Carmen joined her husband in the orchards, taking the boys with her and, after landing a job as a Head Start assistant, still picked cherries in the summer.  When she became a naturalized citizen so did the boys because neither was yet 18.

“My brother and I started working really young,” Sal recalls. “At the end of the day everyone would be worn out. My father would notice how tired we were and lean down and say, ‘If you don’t want to do back breaking work all your life, focus on your education.'”

Consider the advice taken. “My brother and I kind of set a goal,” Sal says. “No one in our family had ever gone to college. My dad wanted us to break the mold.”

After graduating from Cashmere High, Sal headed off to Wenatchee Valley College, uncertain of what he wanted to do. “But I took all the math and science I could get,” says Sal, who eventually decided on a career in health care and began exploring options.

Adán, intent on becoming a pharmacist, suggested Sal consider the same field. The two brothers moved on to pharmacy school at Washington State University. The final year of the four-year program is spent doing rotations in hospitals and clinics. Nasser Basmeh, director of pharmacy at KVH Hospital, calls the training partnership between universities and healthcare organizations like KVH a win-win situation. Students bring cutting-edge knowledge to the medical organizations they work with while gaining real-world experience. “They learn from us. We learn from them,” Basmeh says.

Sal Camargo

Sal’s first stop? KVH Hospital where his determination, knowledge and willingness to learn  impressed Basmeh. “I instantly liked it,” Sal says. “I decided it was the right place for me within the first week. It was like a gut instinct. I liked the hospital. I liked the community. I felt like I fit into the pharmacy team.”

Five other rotations followed, including one at a larger hospital, three at clinics and, when a planned rotation with one organization suddenly fell through, a second stint at KVH.

Last May, Sal’s parents watched proudly as both sons graduated from pharmacy school, the couple’s presence underscoring the significance of that achievement. “My father never misses a day of work,” Sal says. “Even when he’s sick he goes to work. But both our parents were there.”

Even after graduating, Sal continued volunteering on a special project at KVH. In December, he passed his pharmacy boards and in February was offered a part-time position at KVH, a position Basmeh hopes will become full time by year’s end. Sal says it felt like coming home.

“I come from a small town and I have small town values like responsibility, commitment, hard work and respect,” he says. “I’ve been to big hospitals and to small hospitals. I have to say this is the best I’ve seen in terms of making changes to positively impact patient health. They’re very progressive. It feels like the perfect place for me.”

More than medical care: Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners

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April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Last week, some 100 forensic nurses from around the country gathered in Washington DC, seeking help with funding for research, education and prevention efforts related to sexual assault. It’s an ongoing battle to represent the needs of patients who rarely speak for themselves.

Here in Kittitas County, we’re nearing the 6-year mark of our local Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program at KVH Hospital. The program involves a collaborative effort between local law enforcement, ASPEN, CWU, and the hospital; in every situation, trained staff are involved from the initial report of assault through the victim’s medical examination.

Ask any SANE and you’ll find a person who cares deeply about the care and treatment of sexual abuse victims. “It’s very emotional,” says Pam Clemons, RN and SANE at KVH Hospital. “One of the most important responsibilities we have is to be objective – but it’s not always easy.”

Objectivity for SANEs is key, because they are not only caring for and treating patients – they’re also collecting evidence. The SANE program is an example of forensic nursing, providing specialized care for victims and perpetrators of intentionally and unintentionally inflicted trauma. Forensic nurses have a specialized knowledge of the legal system and skills in identifying, evaluating and documenting injuries. According to the International Association of Forensic Nursing, after attending to a patient’s immediate medical needs, a forensic nurse often collects evidence, provides medical testimony in court, and consults with legal authorities.

As an emergency room nurse, Clemons was already familiar with helping patients in crisis situations. Then she saw an unmet need in care for sexual assault victims. “I thought, I can do this. I took the training, and the passion I now have grew out of my experiences.”

The nature of emergencies and traumas is unpredictable and unplanned, which means Clemons and other SANE professionals can’t predict how many patients they’ll see in a given month. Clemons says, “For some reason, patients often come in waves. We won’t see any for months, and then have 3 in one weekend.”

Weekends treating multiple sexual assault victims are tough on these examiners. The emotion and empathy, combined with heightened awareness needed not just for physical care, but forensic procedures, can quickly drain a nurse’s energy. But the sense of satisfaction that comes with helping victims can be almost as overwhelming. It’s one reason why Clemons encourages others who are interested to seek out SANE training. “Every time a nurse joins the group, we learn something from them,” she says. “They bring ideas and past experiences that give us a fresh perspective on what we’re doing.”

Video from the Office for Victims of Crime, US Department of Justice.

Related:
Online SANE training

Managed by Kittitas Valley Healthcare, HealthNews does not provide medical advice. For medical advice, please see your healthcare provider.

Larry Petry

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Larry Petry

He’s a retired Yakima School District superintendent who went on to serve four years as an administrator at Heritage College followed by a stint as CEO of the American Red Cross in King and Kitsap Counties.

He’s also a gifted artist whose work includes metal sculpture, wood carving and “wood-dyed” landscapes and portraits.

An active 72-year-old whose hobbies include riding his three-wheel Harley, Larry Petry is also no stranger to urgent care medical clinics.

“My wife says it seems like I have to hurt myself at least once a year,” he says with a laugh.

Flash back to October 2016.

His wife Nita was in Bellevue where the couple still owns a condo. Petry was in the garage of their Cle Elum home using a hand-held grinder to cut off a piece of steel sticking up from the floor.

Suddenly the tool bounced up, striking him just above his left wrist.

“The strangest thing is it didn’t cut my sweatshirt,” says Petry who tried unsuccessfully to use a butterfly bandage to close the wound. “It wouldn’t hold,” he says. “The gash was too deep and ragged.”

Petry turned to KVH Urgent Care – Cle Elum. Operated by Kittitas Valley Healthcare with support from Kittitas County Public Hospital District No. 2, the clinic provides non-emergency medical care daily from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m.

“I’ve been in those kinds of places a lot,” says Petry who believes it doesn’t make sense – either time or money-wise – to go to the emergency room for a non-serious situation.

“I got into urgent care pretty fast,” he says, calling what came next “a very good experience and far better than what you normally get in a medical facility like that. I found the staff unusually patient-centered. The whole place had a kind of calming effect – you could feel it.”

The nurse who cleaned his wound “was very thorough but she also had a sense of humor,” he says.

So did the provider.

“She was really down-to-earth with this great smile,” he recalls, smiling at the memory of how she “gave me a little bit of a bad time for being so clumsy. She was really good, competent and knew exactly what she was doing.”

Six or eight stitches later, Petry was out the door – and fully impressed.

“It was a good experience all around,” he says. “I was in and out of there fast and the whole thing went smooth. It’s a helluva service for a small community to have.”

Hunter Rogala

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Hunter Rogala

He greets a visitor with a smile, takes an imaginary call on a toy phone, joins his 7-year-old sister Presley for some forward rolls on the tumbling mat in his family’s living room, then hurries off to push a toy lawn mower across the floor.

At 2, Ellensburg’s Hunter Rogala, who weighed in at 9 pounds 10 ounces at birth, looks the picture of good health – and most of the time he is.

“He’s our chunky monkey. He’s got linebacker written all over him,” his father Josh Rogala says with a laugh.

That doesn’t mean Hunter hasn’t given Josh and his wife Sarah panicked moments along the way.

Hunter was three months old when he developed a serious respiratory infection and began struggling to breathe. “He was turning blue,” Josh says recalling how he and Sarah rushed Hunter to the emergency room at KVH Hospital where Hunter was diagnosed with Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), the most common cause of lower respiratory infections in children less than one year old.

Given fluids and medication to reduce inflammation via IV, Hunter also got treatment to open his airways. But staff told the Rogalas that Hunter needed to be in a bigger facility – one that specialized in treating children – and he was transported to Seattle Children’s Hospital.

“We appreciated that they immediately told us he needed to be in a larger hospital,” Sarah says. “There was absolutely no hesitation about sending him somewhere else.”

A few days later, Hunter was home for his first Christmas.

By late January, though, he was back in the emergency room, this time for pneumonia. Then came the day Josh, who works as a wildlife biologist, got a call from Hunter’s daycare saying Hunter had a fever. “I picked him up and immediately took him to the doctor,” Josh says. “I was holding him when he suddenly had a seizure. I’ve seen seizures before but seeing your baby have one is another thing.”

The pediatrician diagnosed Hunter with a febrile seizure caused by an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics. “After that,” Sarah says, “whenever he had a fever we worried.”

Fast forward to August 2016. Josh was just home from work, barefoot and cleaning out his vehicle. Sarah, a social services supervisor for DSHS, had picked Hunter up after work, noticed he felt a little warm, given him Tylenol and was holding him when he suddenly “flopped over” and began seizing.

“We were counting minutes. With febrile seizures, you’re supposed to go the emergency room if they last more than four minutes,” says Sarah, her emotions visible as she recalls that day.

Barefoot, Josh drove the family the short distance from the family’s home to the emergency room as Presley, terrified that Hunter would die, yelled questions.

Diagnosed with a febrile seizure and an ear infection, Hunter got medication to bring his fever down, started oral antibiotics and was happily coloring by the time he was discharged.

“They got us in immediately,” Sarah says. “The nurse was wonderful, totally calming, totally gentle. Everyone was wonderful.” That includes the male nurse who calmed Presley by taking her under wing and pretending that she was his helper.

There’s no question Hunter has given them “stress – and some medical bills,” the Rogalas say. He’s also given them something else: an appreciation for having an emergency department close to home that delivers high quality care and real compassion.

“I’m happy we live close by,” Sarah says. “I think we’ll stay where we are.”

Devan and John Bartlett

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Devan and John Bartlett

For John and Devan Bartlett, the road to love – and to jobs with Kittitas Valley Healthcare – was paved in part by a speed bump caused by an errant dump truck driver.

Twenty one years later, the couple laughs as they recall their beginning.

They’d met in Anchorage. She worked for an eye doctor. He worked for a computer company doing work in her office. She liked his red hair; he liked just about everything about her. He arranged a lunch date, but on his way to meet her, his car was rear-ended by a dump truck at a stoplight. By the time he found a phone, she’d left the restaurant.

Undeterred, he asked her out the following night. It was Cinco de Mayo 1994. “That was the turning point of our lives,” John says. “We consider it our anniversary. We never looked back and we’ll be together as long as we live.”

In 1996 when John took a job with a Yakima hospital Devan came with him. They married and have two children now in their teens. Over time, Yakima – his hometown – grew and lost its hometown feeling, the couple says. On trips, “we’d drive through Ellensburg and talk about how neat it would be to live and work here,” Devan says.

In 2014, John traded his job as senior LAN analyst for a job as network administrator at KVH Hospital. Devan, a patient care technician who plans to become an RN, soon followed. Formerly employed in the day surgery department at the same Yakima hospital as John, she’s now a patient care technician in the medical/surgical department and the birthing center at KVH Hospital.

Energized by a diversity of opportunities and training as well as an atmosphere that encourages active collaboration, Devan calls her time at KVH “a wonderful experience. Everybody here is so friendly and helpful, not just to patients but to each other,” she says. “We learn from each other and we’re constantly talking about how to make the patient experience better. That’s where the focus is. “What I really enjoy is that KVH wants us to cross train so we’re equipped to go into different areas.”

It pays off – occasionally in dramatic fashion.

Case in point: a one-car rollover accident last year that sent three people to KVH Hospital where a trauma team response had been activated. Devan, who was among those called to help, recalls the calm pervading the Emergency Department that day.

“We all knew what we were supposed to do and we helped each other,” she says, noting that Dede Utley, KVH emergency services director, was on hand to help coordinate the response.

Like Devan, John says teamwork and opportunity are key to the workplace climate. Former colleagues worried he might be bored in a smaller organization. Hardly, he says. “There’s a lot of hats to wear and more large scale projects,” Johns says.

And then there’s camaraderie. “Here, you care about people more,” he says. “You want to know what’s going on in their lives and share what’s going on in yours. With bigger organizations, you lose that closeness.”

John & Anne Merrill-Steskal

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John & Anne Merrill-Steskal

When John and Anne Merrill-Steskal went looking for a place to call home, who could have guessed the answer lay at the end of a rainbow?

It was June 1993. John, who attended medical school at the University of Kansas, was finishing a residency in family practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A fellow resident knew Ellensburg. “So I talked to Dr. Bruce Herman who was recruiting for what was then the Valley Clinic (now KVH Family Medicine-Ellensburg),” John says. “We flew out and fell in love with the place immediately.” Their trip included hiking Manastash Ridge with Herman and his wife Dr. Elise Herman.

“There was this huge rainbow at the top of the ridge,” John says. “It was unforgettable. We were both struck by what a beautiful valley it was. It was as if the rainbow was the icing on the cake, confirmation of our impression of Ellensburg and the area in general.”

After all, the Merrill-Steskals had arrived in search of a college town with a good healthcare system, a strong community and easy access to hiking. Nearly a quarter of a century later the only thing that’s changed is a deepening appreciation for the place they call home.

They live at the base of Manastash Ridge on 20 acres they share with two other families. It’s where they raised their son Gabe, an EHS graduate enrolled at Whitman and currently studying piano in Europe. A 12-year-old golden retriever they call Cascade keeps them company.

John, a veteran of 22 years practicing family medicine, also hikes, gardens, does stained glass and makes bread, while Anne, a physical therapist who has worked for Kittitas Valley Healthcare for 16 years and now specializes in vestibular rehabilitation therapy, enjoys spending time with friends and family, landscaping with native plants, hiking and swimming in mountain lakes.

Still in love with their surroundings, they hike the ridge together three days a week. And both say they’ve found fulfilling careers at KVH.

Anne appreciates the opportunities she’s had within the field of physical therapy both to treat diverse conditions and specialize in a variety of areas. In 2013, with KVH support she advanced her education by completing a doctorate in physical therapy.

As for John, “I really like the people at KVH and I believe KVH strives for high quality care. It’s a supportive organization that wants me to be able to do my job,” he says. An instructor for a student he was precepting once asked if he’d ever had a patient encounter that convinced him family medicine had been the right choice for him. “I have those experiences weekly. I love interacting with people,” John says, beaming. “Family medicine is a perfect fit for me and what I love to do.”

And what he loves to do goes far beyond the exam room.

A Passion for Healthy Communication

Convinced that family physicians “need to get out of their clinics and make their voices heard in their communities,” John leads by example sharing what he calls “a passion for behavior that promotes a healthy lifestyle” through social media and technology.

Since June of 2015, he’s hosted Dr. John’s Radio Show which streams at noon on the first Friday of every month on Ellensburg Community Radio. Last March, John launched a monthly blog. It features short, reader-friendly posts on a variety of subjects ranging from the importance of vaccines to a common sense approach to weight loss, his own experience dealing with cancer, the overuse of antibiotics and the benefits of exercise and getting out into nature.

While one-on-one interactions with patients are the cornerstone for his love of being a doctor, he says the radio show and the blog heighten the enjoyment he finds in practicing medicine.

His efforts haven’t gone unnoticed.

This past spring, he was one of two national recipients of the 2016 American Academy of Family Physicians Vaccine Science Fellowships. The fellowships enable recipients to gain expertise in vaccine science and policy. “It ties right into my interest in promoting behaviors that lead to a healthy life,” he says. “Vaccines have prevented disease and saved more lives than any other aspect of medicine.”

Follow Dr. Merrill-Steskal’s blog at espresso3med.wordpress.com.