St. Charles, like most health systems across the country, started 2023 facing significant challenges. But as the year comes to a close, I’m incredibly proud of how far we’ve come and am genuinely enthusiastic about the future of your local, Central Oregon health care provider.
At the beginning of this year our recovery efforts were taking hold but we still didn’t have enough people. And health care simply doesn’t work without people to provide the services. So we focused even harder on rebuilding our workforce by putting more resources into retaining our caregivers and physicians and recruiting more good people into the organization. As I told you last month, we’ve seen remarkable improvement with more than 1,100 new people joining the St. Charles family in the past year.
We’ve always cared about the wellness of our caregivers, but we really wanted to reaffirm that commitment after everything we’ve been through. So we took a fresh look at all of the programs we offer to support our people and we found ways to expand behavioral health services, earned time off, wages and many other benefits.
A year ago our finances were poor, and we needed to improve them quickly to ensure this local, nonprofit organization is here for the next 100 years, just as we’ve been here for the past 100 years. So we also had to maintain laser focus on our financial recovery efforts and recruit everyone across the organization to help out by doing their part – no matter how big or small.
Even with all of these efforts going on, every day our focus remained on our patients. Together, we surpassed our people and our financial goals and provided amazing care throughout the year.
I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every person across our health system for their commitment to our patients and our communities. Because of them, I can tell you with confidence that our ability to provide essential services to Central Oregon is as strong as ever.
Thanks so much for reading this year. See you in 2024.
Sincerely,
Steve
