by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | July 18, 2022
From the July 2022 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
AO: Annie Penn is a wonderful organization. It has a family atmosphere. The employees and the physicians and providers that work here demonstrate teamwork on a daily basis. They are very, very passionate about the work that they do. They're very proud of working for Cone Health and they're also proud of the legacy of Annie Penn.
I see a lot of collaboration here. People have the ability to go and work in other places, but they really want to commit to their hometown and see their hospital in their own town be successful, and so they commit to staying here. That's something I've always found really unique about rural communities — the people that work and live in the community tend to stay in the community.
HCB News: Are there any special projects or initiatives you're undertaking or planning to undertake?
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AO: I’m very excited about the future here in Rockingham County, and with the strength of Cone Health I feel like we can really advance health and wellness in this county. Cone is relaunching some of its strategic priorities and we're working on some really important things.
Our CEO, Dr. Mary Jo Cagle, will talk about moving from being successful, to offering significance. And what I hear her talk about is that Cone has a very long history of being successful: financially successful and providing quality patient care. But providing significance is where we really make a difference in the lives of the patients, and helping them to have the best life they possibly can where they are.
We're going to be working diligently to create healthy communities. What that is about is that we're improving the health and well-being of all of our communities and consumers, so really looking at the community from a holistic perspective and taking into consideration all the challenges the community may have, including many of those I've already stated around socioeconomic status and transportation, and lack of health coverage.
We're also going to be developing ways that we can evolve our workforce so that we're ready and able to create a healthy community. You're aware that nurses are in high demand, and it's really going to require us to be the provider of choice for employees, and particularly nurses, but also to develop different ways that we can care for the patient that might be new.
I'm also going to be working on some very specific things in our community here, and that would be to improve access to care. We need more primary care providers in our community, so we're spending a lot of time recruiting providers to the area here. We are in the midst of hiring another general surgeon, which will give us three for our community here in Reidsville. We have four gastroenterologists that serve in our community here at Annie Penn, which is really outstanding for a rural community, to have four full-time gastroenterologists.
