The Robert A. Mesropian Center for Community Care (RAMCCC), a Department of Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, is pleased to announce that Brian Lombardo, M.D., of Thetford Center, Vt., has returned to its active medical staff. Dr. Lombardo, who has been at the RAMCCC since 1995, is a Family Practice physician who spent the past year in Dakar, Senegal.  He has now returned to full-time practice and is accepting new patients.

TheRobert A. Mesropian Center for Community Care houses a team of physicians and nurse practitioners who are accepting new patients in Family Practice, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. The RAMCCC is located at 123 Mascoma Street in Lebanon; (603) 448-3122.

July 27 — Alice Peck Day Health Systems in Lebanon, N.H., is pleased to announce the appointment of Melvin M. Aaron of Norwich, Vt. as the Associate Administrator of its Harvest Hill retirement community, beginning Monday, August 2. Ron Andrews, current Administrator of Harvest Hill and the Woodlands, will be focusing her attention on administering The Woodlands at Harvest Hill, APD’s recently built independent living facility.

Mr. Aaron has over two decades’ experience in long term care leadership. He joined APD in January as Administrator of the Recovery and Enhanced Care Center. He had served most recently as a consultant for Long Term Care Management Group, providing health care consultation services in the Northeast. Previously, he served as Administrative Director at Caritas Brooklyn–Queens Health Care in Jamaica, N.Y., where he implemented quality improvement programs that improved resident satisfaction, and as Executive Administrator at River Valley Care Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 

He received his M.B.A. and MS in Health Care Administration from Long Island University in Brooklyn, N.Y. and is a member of the American Association ofHomes and Services for Aging.

Harvest Hill is an independent and assisted living retirement community offering on-site medical services, located on the Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital campus in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

On August 8, 2010, Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital (APD) will expand its capacity by five (5) beds in order to consolidate the care currently given in the Rehabilitation and Enhanced Care Center (RECC) under the hospital’s license. “We will be providing the same levels of care for the same number of patients, but in the hospital setting,” said Harry Dorman, Hospital President and CEO. Restructuring APD’s delivery of care allows it to better meet the needs of patients, position the organization for regulatory and healthcare reform, and more efficiently use its available resources.

The consolidation will enable APD to fully utilize its 25 licensed hospital beds. Projections for future needs of services for those the hospital serves in the Upper Valley indicate that the new configuration will be more than adequate. It also allows the hospital to convert most of its medical-surgical beds to single-occupancy rooms, enhancing the quality of care with a lowered risk of infection and increased privacy. Rehabilitation care will continue to be given in the Medical-Surgical unit.

Alice Peck Day will see other improvements from this transition. The move will help to prepare the hospital for anticipated health care reform by creating operational efficiencies. Dorman said, “We believe that consolidating acute and sub-acute patient services under one license is a responsible approach to addressing the stresses affecting hospitals today.”

Most of the RECC staff will be offered positions in the expanded Medical-Surgical Unit; however, APD will reduce its 500-member staff by eight positions as a result of the reorganization. “We regret this loss,” Dorman said, “but we will be assisting these employees with severance packages and are committed to helping them obtain other positions.”

In voting unanimously for the reconfiguration, the Board of Trustees expressed its confidence that this consolidation of services will enable APD to become a stronger community hospital while continuing to provide the personal and excellent clinical care for which it is known.

June 30 - The Sleep Health Center, a department of Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, recently upgraded their facilities and added a new sleep bed to increase capacity for overnight sleep studies. “This will help us get patients evaluated more quickly,” said Lisa Stebbins, CRT, RPSGT, Cardiopulmonary Manager, “and improve our diagnosis and treatment strategies.”

In December 2009, the Sleep Health Center at APD moved sleep studies from the main hospital building to its facilities in the Medical Office Building on the APD campus. The move increased patient privacy and convenience. The recent upgrade is part of an overall plan for continued quality improvement, with a goal of one month from an initial consultation to treatment.

The Sleep Health Center specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders, including insomnia, sleep apnea, and restless leg syndrome. To learn more about the Sleep Health Center at APD, call (603) 448-7436 or visit alicepeckday.org.

On June 16, 2010, the surgical team at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital joined physicians, nurses, and surgical technologists from around the country in observing National Time Out Day. This annual event is sponsored by the Association of PeriOperative Registered Nurses (AORN), the Council on Surgical Safety (CSPS) and The Joint Commission, an independent national organization that accredits and certifies more than 15,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States.

Time Out Day was established to raise awareness about the importance of requiring the entire surgical team to pause and “take time out” before all invasive procedures. The team of physicians, nurses and surgical technologists pause to communicate as a group and confirm key information about the patient and procedure to help prevent medical errors from occurring.

This year, APD is implementing a new surgical comprehensive checklist that will start with each patient as they enter the preoperative area and carry through to the recovery room.  The Comprehensive Surgical Checklist was established at AORN with the help of WHO representatives as well as the Joint Commission. The new checklist utilizes and promotes the continuation of “Time Out,” but is now more expansive and will carry throughout the Surgical Services Department ”We in Surgical Services understand that surgical mistakes take place every day across the nation,” explains RN Phyllis Barrell of Surgical Services, “and we want to do whatever it takes to make sure our patients are safe during their surgeries and invasive procedures here. We know that a checklist can make surgery safer by improving communication surrounding patient care, and we recognize that these tools won’t work unless they are used within an environment that supports open communication among all members of the surgical team.  We feel that APD is the perfect environment for these tools to work.”

June 11 - On Thursday, June 10, Alice Peck Day Health Systems celebrated its volunteers and Auxiliary members with a dinner featuring meteorologist Mark Breen of the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, best known for his regional “Eye on the Sky” weather updates for local radio and television stations.

Chief Operating Officer Todd Miller and Volunteer Coordinator Jane Darby welcomed the attending volunteers, who were also thanked  retiring REC Center Recreational Coordinator Linda Gurney. “In the thirteen and a half years I’ve been at APD, I’ve worked with more than 110 volunteers,” Gurney said. “They have ranged in age from six months to over ninety.” She recalled several notable volunteers and residents, including weekly singalongs and a woman with dementia who “no longer responded to people around her, but would tap her feet to music in perfect time.”

Breen described “A day in the life of a weatherman,” beginning when he rises — at 3:15 every morning — and shared stories of his early days at the Fairbanks Museum, when his only forecasting tools were a World War II-era teletype machine and, later, a small black-and-white television. He also answered many questions about current weather trends and weather lore.

According to Volunteer Services Coordinator Jane Darby, volunteers contributed nearly 6,000 hours to APD in 2009, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics translates to more than $120,000 in service. The APD Auxiliary also makes significant contributions to the hospital community, completing a $100,000 pledge to the hospital in fiscal year 2009. To learn more about volunteering or joining the APD Auxiliary, contact Jane Darby at (603) 448-7456.

June 7 - Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon, N.H., is now using the SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation) initiative to standardize patient handovers.

The nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement calls SBAR “an easy-to-remember, concrete mechanism useful for framing any conversation, especially critical ones, requiring a clinician’s immediate attention and action. It allows for an easy and focused way to set expectations for what will be communicated and how between members of the team, which is essential for developing teamwork and fostering a culture of patient safety.” Patrick Donovan, RN, of APD’s Surgical Services explains that SBAR includes “a clear, concise and consistent record of information” that will be used every time a patient goes from one area of the hospital to another.

June 1 - Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon, N.H., is pleased to welcome Rick H. Senn of Fairlee Vt., as Practice Manager of General Surgery at APD.

Senn was most recently a Practice Management Consultant and multi-site Office Manager at St. John’s Mercy Medical Group in St. Louis, where he provided operational support for nine physician practices, set up new practices, and helped implement the organization’s transition to electronic health records. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Health Service Management from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Alice Peck Day General Surgery (formerly know as the Kroner Clinic), a department of Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, provides a variety of general surgical services and has served the community since 1985.

May 27 -  Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital is pleased to welcome Mindy Wallace, MSN, CRNA, ARNP, FAAPM of Monroe, N.H. to its medical staff. She will be practicing at APD’s new Pain Management Clinic, located at the Homestead Building on the APD campus in Lebanon, starting June 14. Wallace will be providing pain management services for conditions such as arthritis, bone and joint pain, fibromyalgia and neuropathic pain.

Wallace served most recently as a Pain Management provider and Medical Director of the Pain Clinic at Cottage Hospital in Woodsville, N.H.  She was a Nurse Anesthetist at APD from 1995–2000. Wallace received her MS in Nursing at the University of Cincinnati and is a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pain Management and a member of the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists, the American Academy of Pain Management, and the New Hampshire Association of Nurse Practitioners. To book appointments with her, call (603) 443-9508.

May 10 - Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon, N.H., is pleased to announce the engagement of Greenway Medical Technologies of Carrollton, Ga. to begin developing an electronic data management system that will establish Electronic Health Records for clinic patients. The project, estimated to cost over $1 million, will kick off early in May.

“Electronic Health Records have many benefits; they will allow us to improve efficiency and better serve our patients, helping us coordinate data sharing between providers on our campus and offices statewide,” says Lorraine Nichols, Director of Information Services.

Dr. Sheila Feyrer, Medical Director of Informatics, explains: “Our goal is to make it easier to update and access patient information across all areas of their care. We’ll be better able to track individual pieces of information such as laboratory reports and complete medication lists, which will give us a much more efficient and accurate set of records.”

The system will be funded in part by a $720,000 bequest from the estate of the late Mary T. Burke, a long-time Auxiliary member and friend of the hospital who served as a trustee, volunteer, and incorporator.