At Jefferson Healthcare Visit, Cantwell Joins Providers to Discuss Expanding Cancer Treatment & Preserving Rural Reproductive Care

09.06.24

At Jefferson Healthcare Visit, Cantwell Joins Providers to Discuss Expanding Cancer Treatment & Preserving Rural Reproductive Care

Cantwell helped secure $4.5M in federal funding for Jefferson Healthcare to expand radiation care & add ENT, neurology, & pulmonology clinic

PORT TOWNSEND - Yesterday, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) convened a roundtable with leaders and providers at Jefferson Healthcare to discuss rural reproductive care, hospital cybersecurity, and an ongoing expansion project that involves construction of a new clinic and addition of a new radiation cancer treatment therapy service.

"This 200 people a year who travel from Port Townsend to Sequim and Kitsap County and across the Sound for radiation treatment, it's just too much," Sen. Cantwell said during the roundtable. "So we've been glad to partner with you on this and helping this expansion. We're excited to see actual construction."

"Our state's going to continue to grow, and this is going to be one of the areas that people choose to live in, and [they need] the kind of care that isn't dependent on a ferry ride or a long drive," she added.

During the roundtable discussion - which can be watched in full HERE - providers also discussed the importance of providing full reproductive care in rural areas. Jefferson Healthcare offers a full range of OB-GYN services, including surgical abortion, labor and delivery services, and pediatrics, despite the relatively low number of births. According to hospital staff, about 79 babies were born at the hospital last year.

"We've been trying to figure out how to tackle the challenges of doing OB in a small community. We're all really dedicated to keeping OB, but it is one of the service lines that often gets cut when a hospital is struggling, because it doesn't bring in the money, it has a really high risk rate for malpractice lawsuits, it's hard to maintain," said Dr. Molly Parker, Reproductive Health Lead Physician. "A night on call for me here - I'm a family doctor, so I deliver babies, then I take care of the babies, then I take care of everybody in the family after that. So if I'm on call to deliver a baby, I'm the obstetrician, then I become the pediatrician, if the baby doesn't do well I become the NICU until we can get the baby over to Seattle."

"We have to have a skill set that's really broad, to stay out here," she added. "It's a high cost to maintain a very small labor and delivery space, but it's so important when I think about the patients and the community out here."

Following the roundtable, Sen. Cantwell took a tour of the construction site that will eventually be home to Jefferson Healthcare's new clinic, and also viewed the future home of soon-to-be-installed radiation therapy treatment equipment. Sen. Cantwell recently helped Jefferson Healthcare secure two federal grants to expand its services:

• $2.5 million for a linear accelerator, which will allow cancer patients in Jefferson County to access radiation therapy. Currently Jefferson Healthcare is only able to offer chemotherapy for cancer treatment, and patients who need radiation therapy are forced to travel significant distances for appointments. In a typical year, about 200 people are forced to travel long distances for each of the multiple visits that radiation treatment requires, while others have had to forego radiation entirely because traveling that often is too hard.
• $2 million to build out a new clinic expanding treatment for seniors, which will allow the hospital to provide new specialties like Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT), neurology, and pulmonology, and expand existing specialties like dermatology. Jefferson County has the largest share of seniors of any county in Washington state, 41.6%. It's also geographically isolated, requiring seniors seeking specialty services to drive more than an hour both ways. Establishing these services in Jefferson County will allow more patients to access care closer to home.

Sen. Cantwell is a strong supporter of strengthening health care services in rural areas. In July, she visited Island Hospital in Anacortes to celebrate the hospital's newly-completed new helipad, which will help patients in Island and Skagit counties get treatment faster in an emergency.

In June, Sen. Cantwell joined her colleagues in introducing the Keep Obstetrics Local Act, which would help offset the costs of operating labor and delivery units in rural areas by increasing Medicaid payment rates for those services, with enhanced federal financing for eligible rural and high-need urban hospitals.

Video of the roundtable discussion is available HERE; b-roll of Sen. Cantwell touring the facility is HERE; and photos are HERE.

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