Llano County is fighting to save rural healthcare
LLANO COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) — For decades people living in and around the city of Llano have relied on their local hospital.
It’s the place to go in case of an emergency, but also for lab tests, physical therapy and much more.
“The hospital is important in a lot of ways,” said Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham. “The first way is just the critical care it can provide and it can not only provide it to us, but to the surrounding counties.”
Llano is about 30 minutes from the nearest large hospital and about an hour and half from Austin, so the hospital plays a crucial role for people living in the Hill Country.
“It is a necessary service that we have to have,” said Pat McDowell, who lives in Llano.
Currently, Mid Coast Central, formerly Llano Memorial Hospital, is run by Mid Coast Health System, but the County of Llano wants to take over.
“Right now we are in the process of separating from Mid Coast and what we are going to do is take it back and run it as an independent hospital taken on by the County of Llano Hospital Authority Board,” said Cunningham.
The hospital has had struggles bringing in enough revenue to operate over the years, but Cunningham says they believe once the County takes over they can change that.
“There is a lot of that money that goes from the hospital into their corporate overhead and that is one of the things we wanted to try to do was to take that money and keep it local,” said Cunningham.
Cunningham says step one is terminating the contract agreement with Mid Coast, then getting a Rural Emergency Hospital designation, which would mean federal funding opportunities.
“Once we can do that, what the county will do is, the county will have a critically access designated hospital,” said Cunningham. “We will be able to offer a swing bed program for patients who have had anything like a knee replacement or any type of surgery that would be a day surgery, but they need a little more care. It would be a swing bed program for them, we will be back into offering the mammograms for women, the bone density scans, the radiology department would be up and running, and we will have a really robust clinical lab also.”
Hatch Smith, who is the Hospital administrator, says the county will keep the hospital running and that there was never any fear that it would close, but it does need support.
“It really takes the community to support it and by that I mean they need to use it, just like a grocery store or restaurant,” said “You need to use the hospital so that it is there.”
Smith says more people need to be paying attention to rural healthcare and that lawmakers should take a closer look at some of the hospitals that have closed and the impacts to the surrounding communities.
“I think our state lawmakers, if they don’t wake up and pay attention to healthcare, specifically rural healthcare, it is going to be a bigger disaster than they are aware of,” said Smith.
KXAN also reached out to Mid Coast for comment, but has not heard back at this time.
