Services at EARH

Your District has always sought to be your “medical home”, a one-stop portal to all the healthcare services you need.

That does not mean that we here can provide every service you might need: we cannot, for example, perform brain surgery.

But, like all rural healthcare facilities, we do try to offer at least initial access to most or all of the various medical specialties you are likely to need.

We do that, or try to, by having a spectrum of medical specialists make periodic visits to our facility, where they can see patients and offer services from initial screening to continuing care.

For us to do that, we need to be able to offer such specialists a sufficient number of patient appointments for it to make sense for them to make the trek to our facility.

It is not reasonable to expect medical specialists to travel from, say, Spokane or Moses Lake to Ritzville to see one or two patients.

We believe that there are several specialties for which our community includes a sufficient number of potential patients to make visits by the corresponding specialists of merit for both the community and for those specialists.

But, to be frank, we have long had continuing problems with generating enough appointments to attract and retain such specialists on a continuing basis.

We are fortunate to currently have regularly visiting specialists in dentistry and cardiology, plus an MRI coach and soon, we hope and expect, mammography.

But we believe that there are many more specialties that the community could take advantage of, did we have sufficient traffic to attract the appropriate specialists.

Such specialties might include optometry, podiatry, oncology, orthopedics, dermatology, endoscopy, geriatrics, and many more.

Those with good memories may recall that the District has had quite a few of those specialties covered in past; we no longer have them because the traffic dwindled.

Patients would make appointments, then cancel at the last moment, or simply not show up.

We cannot offer access to specialties if patients do not seek such access. If you feel that you or someone in your household could and would like to be able to see a visiting specialist in a field to which we do not at present offer local access, you need to tell us so.

When we get a reasonable number of patients telling us they would like to be able to see a visiting specialist in this or that field, we are in a strong position to seek practitioners in that field who will visit here.

But if you don’t tell us so, or if you tell us so but then do not take advantage of such visits when they are offered, we cannot be of help.

So: if you would like to be able to see a qualified medical specialist right here at your local healthcare facility, tell us so. Write us, call us, email us, or just stop by.

Help us to help you.