While many rural healthcare providers struggled to provide services and stay in business during and following the Covid-19 pandemic, Tyler Holmes Memorial Hospital chose to expand.
“We ended our fiscal year 2021 on a positive note. Our audited financial statements are not complete yet, but our preliminary numbers are looking good after a rough few years, said Cori Bailey, hospital administrator.
The hospital has grown into a system, offering a range of services in multiple locations.
“We have one provider in Winona Family Practice Fast Track. That is Amy Gammel,” said Bailey. “The fast track was in response to Covid in order to try to keep our sick patients separate from our well patients.”
Hospital personnel created a new entrance at Winona Family Practice, she said.
“It has its own separate entrance so that the well patients aren’t going into the same door as the sick patients,” said Bailey. “Amy is in there treating our sick patients.”
Dr. Dewayne Gammel and Nurse Practitioner Maggie Taylor provide health services at Crossroads Family Medicine on Woodland Drive in Winona, Bailey said.
“In July 2020, we opened our Tyler Holmes Carrollton Clinic in Carrollton,” she said. “We have Nurse Practitioner Julia Oliver Johnson there.”
For about nine years, Tyler Holmes outsourced therapy patients to adequately serve them, Bailey said.
However, since Crossroads relocated from Tyler Holmes Drive to Woodland Drive, therapy patient care is being provided across the street from the hospital on Tyler Holmes Drive.
“Most of the therapists there are the same therapists that we had with our contract agency,” said Bailey. “I like to call them homegrown because a lot of the therapists there are from Winona. They may be your best friend’s granddaughter. They’re homegrown people, hometown people.”
She said the facility recently has been renovated to meet the needs of Tyler Holmes patients receiving therapy.
“The therapy director there is Ashley Williamson, and she’s doing a great job,” said Bailey.
Due to federal funds to provide some pandemic relief, the hospital was able to alter intake procedures to further promote health among patients.
Hospital personnel used the funding to alter admissions by having Covid patients enter through the emergency room and well patients enter through the front of the hospital, Bailey said.
“If you use any of our services; if you have any respiratory symptoms; if you think you might have Covid or the flu, we ask, even though you may be a patient of Dr. Rushing or you may be a patient of Dr. Gammel, we try to funnel all of our sick patients through the Fast Track,” said Bailey.
She went on to say that once, “all of our admissions went through the emergency room. So, in order to keep our symptomatic people separated from people that are there just to get an x-ray or lab work, those Covid patients still need to go through the emergency room to be registered, and our well patients come through the front door.”
Bailey said the front entrance area has been changed from a waiting area to an admissions department.
She also said the hospital maintains an area specifically equipped for Covid patients.
Tyler Holmes Memorial Hospital offers an array of other services including Wound Care, Social Services and Life Solutions.
