Hospital District Will Succumb With Doctor’S Departure
With the upcoming move of a physician out of the Wallace Clinic, the East Shoshone Hospital District will be history, the district’s board chairman said Wednesday.
Dr. Deb Elliott-Pearson moves in September to the former Asarco building being remodeled in downtown Wallace. The hospital had rented out the clinic building, which it is buying from the Magnuson Trust.
“We will not have a hospital or a viable clinic,” chairman Ed Eckel said. “That will kill us as a district. That’s what we want.”
Elliott-Pearson has agreed to store the medical records and X-rays of the Silver Valley Medical Center, which the hospital district operated until it closed last September for lack of patients.
Eckel is among three new board members who sought their jobs in order to shut down the tax-supported district as soon as possible. The district must exist long enough to collect taxes to pay off its $800,000 debt, however.
After a judge approved a bankruptcy plan in July, the district paid its attorneys and small individual claims. This month’s distribution of property tax will pay for maintenance of the vacant building and to finish paying the lawyers, Eckel said.
The question of what to do with the Silverton building remains a big one. Various ideas have fizzled, including a recent proposal to use it for a juvenile diversion program.
Family Hospital Corp. is exploring the possibility of using the building. Jason Wolcott, vice president of the Lewiston-based company, will meet with Eckel and others on Aug. 18.
Wolcott said Wednesday that the firm “is a little bit past” the evaluation stage. It has surveyed doctors in the Silver Valley to determine their support of a unified, valleywide hospital that might use the Silverton building.
Wolcott said that, predictably, doctors at the east end of the valley liked the idea. Those at the west end, which has Shoshone Medical Center in Kellogg, did not.
Family Hospital Corp. owns and operates a hospital and ambulatory care center in Puerto Rico, Wolcott said, and is looking for other properties.