Suspecting an intracerebral hemorrhage and knowing the ER was no longer functioning, the paramedics who had arrived at Findley’s home called for air transport before leaving. For definitive treatment, Findley would need to go to a neurology center located 90 miles north in Kansas City, Mo. The ambulance crew stabilized him as they waited.

But the dispatcher for Air Methods, a private air ambulance company, checked with at least four bases before finding a pilot to accept the flight, according to a 911 tape obtained by Kaiser Health News through a Kansas Open Records Act request.

“My Nevada crew is not available and my Parsons crew has declined,” the operator tells Fort Scott’s emergency line about a minute after taking the call. Then she says she will be “reaching out to” another crew.

Nearly seven minutes passed before one was en route.

When Linda Findley sat at her kitchen counter in late May and listened to the 911 tape, she blinked hard: “I didn’t know that they could just refuse. … I don’t know what to say about that.”

Both Mercy and Air Methods declined to comment on Findley’s case.

When Mercy Hospital Fort Scott closed at the end of 2018, hospital president Reta Baker had been “absolutely terrified” about the possibility of not having emergency care for a community where she had raised her children and grandchildren and served as chair of the local Chamber of Commerce. Now, just a week after the ER’s closure, her fears were being tested.

Nationwide, more than 110 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, and in each instance a community struggles to survive in its own way. In Fort Scott, home to 7,800, the loss of its 132-year-old hospital opened by nuns in the 19th century has wrought profound social, emotional and medical consequences. Kaiser Health News and NPR are following Fort Scott for a year to explore deeper national questions about whether small communities need a traditional hospital at all. If not, what would take its place?

Delays in emergency care present some of the thorniest dilemmas for nurses, physicians and emergency workers. Minutes can make the difference between life and death — and seconds can be crucial when it comes to surviving a heart attack, a stroke, an anaphylactic allergic reaction or a complicated birth.

Though air ambulances can transport patients quickly, the dispatch system is not coordinated in many states and regions across the country. And many air ambulance companies do not participate in insurance networks, which leads to bills of tens of thousands of dollars.

Knowing that emergency care was crucial, the hospital’s owner, St. Louis-based Mercy, agreed to keep Fort Scott’s emergency doors open an extra month past the hospital’s Dec. 31 closure, to give Baker time to find a temporary operator. A last-minute deal was struck with a hospital about 30 miles away, but the ER still needed to be remodeled and the new operator had to meet regulatory requirements. So, it closed for 18 days — a period that proved perilous.

A Risky Experiment

During that time, Fort Scott’s publicly funded ambulances responded to more than 80 calls for service and drove more than 1,300 miles for patients to get care in other communities.

Across America, rural patients spend “statistically significant” more time in an ambulance than urban patients after a hospital closes, said Alison Davis, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s department of agricultural economics. Davis and research associate SuZanne Troske analyzed thousands of ambulance calls and found the average transport time for a rural patient was 14.2 minutes before a hospital closed; afterward, it increased nearly 77% to 25.1 minutes. For patients over 64, the increase was steeper, nearly doubling.

In Fort Scott this February, the hospital’s closure meant people didn’t “know what to expect if we come pick them up,” or where they might end up, said Fort Scott paramedic Chris Rosenblad.

Barbara Woodward, 70, slipped on ice outside a downtown Fort Scott business during the early February storm. The former X-ray technician said she knew something was broken. That meant a “bumpy” and painful 30-mile drive to a nearby town, where she had emergency surgery for a shattered femur, a bone in her thigh.

About 60% of calls to the Fort Scott’s ambulances in early February were transported out of town, according to the log, which KHN requested through the Kansas Open Records Act. The calls include a 41-year-old with chest pain who was taken more than 30 miles to Pittsburg, an unconscious 11-year-old driven 20 miles to Nevada, Mo., and a 19-year-old with a seizure and bleeding eyes escorted nearly 30 miles to Girard, Kan.

Those miles can harm a patient’s health when they are experiencing a traumatic event, Davis said. They also prompt other, less obvious, problems for a community. The travel time keeps the crews absent from serving local needs. Plus, those miles cause expensive emergency vehicles to wear out faster.

Mercy donated its ambulances to the joint city and county emergency operations department. Bourbon County Commissioner Lynne Oharah said he’s not sure how they will pay for upkeep and the buying of future vehicles. Mercy had previously owned and maintained the fleet, but now it falls to the taxpayers to support the crew and ambulances. “This was dropped on us,” said LeRoy “Nick” Ruhl, also a county commissioner.

Even local law enforcement feel extra pressure when an ER closes down, said Bourbon County Sheriff Bill Martin. Suspects who overdose or suffer split lips and black eyes after a fight need medical attention before getting locked up — that often forces officers to escort them to another community for emergency treatment.

And Bourbon County, with its 14,600 residents, faces the same dwindling tax base as most of rural America. , about 3.4% fewer people live in the county compared with nearly a decade ago. Before the hospital closed, Bourbon County paid Mercy $316,000 annually for emergency medical services. In April, commissioners approved an annual $1 million budget item to oversee ambulances and staffing, which the city of Fort Scott agreed to operate.

In order to make up the nearly $700,000 difference in the budget, Oharah said, the county is counting on the ambulances to transport patients to hospitals. The transports are essential because ambulance services get better reimbursement from Medicare and private insurers when they take patients to a hospital as compared with treating patients at home or at an accident scene.

Added Response Times

For time-sensitive emergencies, Fort Scott’s 911 dispatch calls go to Air Methods, one of the largest for-profit air ambulance providers in the U.S. It has a base 20 miles away in Nevada, Mo., and another base in Parsons, Kan., about 60 miles away.

The company’s central communications hub, known as AirCom, in Omaha, Neb., gathers initial details of an incident before contacting the pilot at the nearest base to confirm response, said Megan Smith, a spokeswoman for the company. The entire process happens in less than five minutes, Smith said in an emailed statement.

When asked how quickly the helicopter arrived for Robert Findley, Bourbon County EMS Director Robert Leisure said he was “unsure of the time the crew waited at the pad.” But, he added, “the wait time was very minimal.”

Rural communities nationwide are increasingly dependent on air ambulances as local hospitals close, said Rick Sherlock, president of the Association of Air Medical Services, an industry group that represents the air ambulance industry. AAMS estimates that nearly 85 million Americans rely on the mostly hospital-based and private industry to reach a high-level trauma center within 60 minutes, or what the industry calls the “golden hour.”

In June, when Sherlock to Congress about high-priced air ambulance billing, he pointed to Fort Scott as a devastated rural community where air service “helped fill the gap in rural health care.”

But, as Findley’s case shows, the gap is often difficult to fill. After Air Methods’ two bases failed to accept the flight, the AirCom operator called at least two more before finding a ride for the patient.

The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act states that airline companies cannot be regulated on “rates, routes, or services,” a provision originally meant to ensure that commercial flights could move efficiently between states. Today, in practice, that means air ambulances have no mandated response times, there are no requirements that the closest aircraft will come, and they aren’t legally obligated to say why a flight was declined.

The air ambulance industry has faced years of scrutiny over accidents, including investigations by the and stricter rules from the . And Air Methods’ Smith said the company does not publicly report on why flights are turned down because “we don’t want pilots to feel pressured to fly in unsafe conditions.”

Yet a lack of accountability can lead to mostly for-profit providers sometimes putting profits first, Scott Winston, Virginia’s assistant director of emergency medical services, wrote in an email. Air ambulances can be delayed because of bad weather or crew fatigue from previous runs.

Or sometimes companies accept a call knowing their closest aircraft is unavailable, rather than lose the business. “This could result in added response time,” he wrote.

Air ambulances don’t face the detailed reporting requirements imposed on ground ambulances. The National Emergency Medical Services Information System collects only about 50% of air ambulance events because the industry’s private operators voluntarily provide the information.

Saving Lives

It took months, but Baker persuaded Ascension Via Christi’s Pittsburg hospital, which sits 30 miles south of Fort Scott, to reopen the ER. “They kind of were at a point of desperation,” said Randy Cason, president of Pittsburg’s hospital. The two Catholic health systems signed a two-year agreement, leaving Fort Scott relieved but nervous about the long term.

Ascension has said it is looking at potential facilities in the area, but it’s unclear what that means. Fort Scott Economic Development Director Rachel Pruitt said in a July 23 email, “No decisions have been made.” Fort Scott City Manager Dave Martin said the city has entered into a “nondisclosure agreement” with Ascension to look into the health system’s ability to continue offering health care to Fort Scott, though Martin could not confirm whether that included an emergency department.

Nancy Dickey, executive director of the Texas A&M Rural & Community Health Institute, said every community prioritizes emergency services. That’s because the “first hour appears to be vitally important in terms of outcomes,” she said.

And the Fort Scott ER, which reopened under Ascension on Feb. 18, has proved its value. So far, in the past six months, Ascension’s Fort Scott emergency department has taken care of more than 2,500 patients, including delivering three babies. In May, a city ambulance crew had resuscitated a heart attack patient at his home and Ascension’s emergency department staff treated the patient until an air ambulance arrived.

In July, Fort Scott’s Deputy Fire Chief Dave Bruner read a note from that patient’s grateful wife at a city commission meeting: “They gave my husband the chance to fight long enough to get to Freeman ICU. As a nurse, I know the odds of Kevin surviving the ‘widow maker’ were very poor. You all made the difference.”

By contrast, Linda Findley believes the local paramedics did everything possible to save her husband but wonders how the lack of an ER and the air ambulance delays might have changed her husband’s outcome. After being flown to Kansas City, Robert Findley died.

This is the third installment in KHN’s year-long series, No Mercy, which follows how the closure of one beloved rural hospital disrupts a community’s health care, economy and equilibrium.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

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This story can be republished for free (details).

She made the trip in pain, having skipped her morphine for the day to be able to drive safely. Since she sometimes “gets the pukes” after treatment, she had her neighbor and friend Shirley Palmer, 76, come along to drive her back.

Continuity of care is crucial for cancer patients in the midst of treatment, which often requires frequent repeated outpatient visits. So when Mercy Hospital Fort Scott, the rural hospital in Endicott-Coyan’s hometown, was slated to close its doors at the end of 2018, hospital officials had arranged for its cancer clinic — called the “Unit of Hope” — to remain open.

Then “I got the email on Jan. 15,” said Reta Baker, the hospital’s CEO. It informed her that , the contractor that operated and staffed the unit, had decided to shut it down too, just two weeks later.

“There are too many changes in that town” to keep the cancer center open, Yoosaf “Abe” Abraham, chief operating officer of the Cancer Center of Kansas, later told KHN. He added that patients would be “OK” because they could get treated at the center’s offices in Chanute and Parsons.

From Fort Scott, those facilities are 50 and 63 miles away, respectively.

For Endicott-Coyan and dozens of other cancer patients, the distance meant new challenges getting lifesaving treatment. “You have a flat tire, and there is nothing out here,” Endicott-Coyan said, waving her arm toward the open sky and the pastures dotted with black Angus and white-faced Hereford cattle on either side of the shoulderless, narrow highway she now must drive to get to her chemo appointment.

Nationwide, . In each case, a unique but familiar loss occurs. Residents, of course, lose health care services as wards are shut and doctors and nurses begin to move away.

But the ripple effect can be equally devastating. The economic vitality of a community takes a blow without the hospital’s high-paying jobs and it becomes more difficult for other industries to attract workers who want to live in a town with a hospital. Whatever remains is at risk of withering without the support of the stabilizing institution.

The 7,800 residents of Fort Scott are reeling from the loss of their 132-year-old community hospital that was closed at the end of December by Mercy, a St. Louis-based nonprofit health system. Founded on the frontier in the 19th century and rebuilt into a 69-bed modern facility in 2002, the hospital had outlived its use, with largely empty inpatient beds, the parent company said. For the next year, Kaiser Health News and NPR will track how its citizens fare after the closure in the hopes of answering pressing national questions: Do citizens in small communities like Fort Scott need a traditional hospital for their health needs? If not a hospital, what then?

Traveling The Distance For Cancer Care

Reta Baker, the hospital’s president who grew up on a farm south of Fort Scott, understood that the hospital’s closure was unavoidable. She scrambled to make sure basic health care needs would be met. Mercy agreed to keep the building open and lights on until 2021. And Baker recruited a federally qualified health center to take over four outpatient clinics, including one inside the hospital; former employees were bought out and continue to operate a rehabilitation center; and the nonprofit in Pittsburg reopened the emergency department in February.

But cancer care in rural areas, which requires specialists and the purchase and storage of a range of oncology drugs, presents unique challenges.

Rural cancer patients typically traveling each way to treatment than those who live in more urban areas, according to a recent national survey by ASCO, the American Society of Clinical Oncology. , a cattle rancher’s daughter who is now chair of ASCO’s board, called this a “tremendous burden.” Cancer care, she explained, is “not just one visit and you’re done.”

ASCO used federal data to find that while about of Americans live in rural areas, only of oncologists practice there.

People in rural America are more likely to die from cancer than those in the country’s metropolitan counties, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . It found 180 cancer deaths per 100,000 people a year in rural counties, compared with 158 deaths per 100,000 in populous metropolitan counties.

The discrepancy is partly because habits like smoking are more common among rural residents, but the risk of dying goes beyond that, said Jane Henley, a CDC epidemiologist and lead author of the . “We know geography can affect your risk factors, but we don’t expect it to affect mortality.”

From an office inside a former Mercy outpatient clinic, Fort Scott’s cancer support group, Care to Share, continues its efforts to meet some of the community’s needs — which in some ways have increased since the Unit of Hope closed. It provides Ensure nutritional supplements, gas vouchers and emotional support to cancer patients.

Lavetta Simmons, one of the support group’s founders, said she will have to raise more money to help people pay for gas so they can drive farther to treatments. Last year, in this impoverished corner of southeastern Kansas, Care to Share spent more than $17,000 providing gas money to area residents who had to travel to the Mercy hospital or farther away for care.

The group expects to spend more on gas this year, having spent nearly $6,000 during the first four months of 2019.

And the reserves of donated Ensure from Mercy are running out, so Simmons is reaching out to hospitals in nearby counties for help.

With Mercy Hospital Fort Scott closed, the likelihood of residents here dying from their cancer will grow, experts worry, because it’s that much harder to access specialists and treatments.

Krista Postai, who took over the Fort Scott hospital’s four primary care clinics, said it’s not unusual for her staff to “see someone walk in [with] end-stage cancer that they put off because they didn’t have money, they didn’t have insurance, or it’s just the way you are. … We wait too long here.”

‘If They Can’t Cure Me, I’m Done’

Art Terry, 71, a farmer and Vietnam veteran, was one of them. Doctors discovered Terry’s cancer after he broke a rib while baling hay. When they found a mass below his armpit, it was already late-stage breast cancer that had metastasized to his bones.

With his twice-weekly chemotherapy treatment available in the “Unit of Hope,” Terry spent hours there with his son and grandchildren telling stories and jokes as if they were in their own living room. The nurses began to feel like family, and Terry brought them fresh eggs from his farm.

“Dad couldn’t have better or more personalized care anywhere,” said his son, Dwight, bleary-eyed after a factory shift.

Terry knew it was difficult to find trustworthy cancer care. The shortage of cancer specialists in southeastern Kansas meant that many, including Mercy Hospital Fort Scott’s patients, counted on traveling oncologists to visit their communities once or twice a week.

Wichita-based Cancer Center of Kansas has nearly two dozen locations statewide. It began leasing space in Fort Scott’s hospital basement in the mid-2000s, the center’s Abraham said. The hospital provided the staff while the Cancer Center of Kansas paid rent and sent roving oncologists to drop in and treat patients.

At its closing, the Unit of Hope served nearly 200 patients, with about 40% of them on chemotherapy treatment.

When Art Terry was diagnosed, his son tried to talk to him about seeking treatment at the bigger hospitals and academic centers in Joplin, Mo., or the Kansas City area. The elder Terry wasn’t interested. “He’s like, ‘Nope,’” Dwight Terry recalled. “I’m going right there to Fort Scott. If they can’t cure me, I’m done. I’m not driving.’”

In the end, as the elder Terry struggled to stay alive, Dwight Terry said he would have driven his father the hour to Chanute for treatment. Gas — already a mounting expense as they traveled the 20 miles from the farm near tiny Prescott, Kan., to Fort Scott — would be even more costly. And the journey would be taxing for his father, who traveled so little over the course of his life that he had visited Kansas City only twice in the past 25 years.

As it turned out, the family never had to make a choice. Art Terry’s cancer advanced to his brain and killed him days before the hospital’s cancer unit closed.

What Happens Next?

As Endicott-Coyan and her friend Palmer drove to Chanute for treatment, they passed the time chatting about how the hospital’s closure is changing Fort Scott. “People started putting their houses up for sale,” Palmer said.

Like many in Fort Scott, they had both spent their days at the Fort Scott hospital. Endicott-Coyan worked in administration for more than 23 years; Palmer volunteered with the auxiliary for six years.

The hospital grew with the community. But as the town’s fortunes fell, it’s perhaps no surprise that the hospital couldn’t survive. But the intertwined history of Mercy and Fort Scott is also why its loss hit so many residents so hard.

Fort Scott began in 1842 when the U.S. government built a military fort to help with the nation’s westward expansion. Historians say Fort Scott was a boomtown in the years just after the Civil War, with its recorded population rising to more than 10,000 as the town competed with Kansas City to become the largest railroad center west of the Mississippi. The hospital was an integral part of the community after Sisters of Mercy nuns opened a 10-bed hospital in 1886 with a mission to serve the needy and poor. Baker, Mercy Hospital Fort Scott’s president, said the cancer center was an extension of that mission.

The Unit of Hope began operating out of the newest hospital building’s basement, which was “pretty cramped,” Baker said. As cancer treatments improved, it grew so rapidly that Mercy executives moved it to a spacious first-floor location that had previously been the business offices.

“Our whole purpose when we designed it was for it to be a place where somebody who was coming to have something unpleasant done could actually feel pampered and be in a nice environment,” Baker said.

The center, with its muted natural grays and browns, had windows overlooking the front parking lot and forested land beyond. Every patient could look out the windows or watch their personal television terminal, and each treatment chair had plenty of space for family members to pull up chairs.

When Endicott-Coyan and Palmer arrived at the Cancer Center of Kansas clinic in Chanute in February, things looked starkly different. Patients entered a small room through a rusted back door. Three brown infusion chairs sat on either side of the entry door and two television monitors were mounted high on the walls. A nurse checked Endicott-Coyan’s blood pressure and ushered her back to a private room to get a shot in her stomach. She was ready to leave about 15 minutes later.

The center’s Abraham said the Chanute facility is “good for patients for the time being” and not a “Taj Mahal” like Mercy’s Fort Scott hospital building, which he said was too expensive to maintain. Cancer Center of Kansas plans to open a clinic at a hospital in Girard, which is about 30 miles from Fort Scott, he said.

Some oncology doctors would say driving is not necessary. Indeed, a few health care systems across the country, such as Sanford Health in South Dakota and Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Pennsylvania, are administering some chemotherapy in patients’ homes. Oncologist Adam Binder, who practices at Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia, said “over 50% of chemotherapy would be safe to administer in the home setting if the right infrastructure existed.”

But the infrastructure — that is, the nurses who would travel to treat patients and a reimbursement model to pay for such care within our complex health care system — is not yet in place.

Back in the car, Palmer took the wheel and Endicott-Coyan began planning for future cancer treatments in the void left by Mercy Hospital Fort Scott’s closure. “I put a note on Facebook today and said, ‘OK, I have drivers for the rest of February; I need drivers for March!’”

This is the second installment in KHN’s year-long series, No Mercy, which follows how the closure of one beloved rural hospital disrupts a community’s health care, economy and equilibrium.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

The town manager was there, along with the franchisee of the local McDonald’s, an insurance agency owner and the receptionist from the big auto sales lot. Baker, who grew up on a farm south of town, knew them all.

Still, she paused in the doorway with her chin up to take in the scene. Then, lowering her voice, she admitted: “Nobody talked to me after the announcement.”

Just a few months before, Baker — joining with the hospital’s owner, St. Louis-based Mercy — announced the 132-year-old hospital would close. Baker carefully orchestrated face-to-face meetings with doctors, nurses, city leaders and staff members in the final days of September and on Oct. 1. Afterward, she sent written notices to the staff and local newspaper.

For the 7,800 people of Fort Scott, about 90 miles south of Kansas City, the hospital’s closure was a loss they never imagined possible, sparking anger and fear.

“Babies are going to be dying,” said longtime resident Darlene Doherty, who was at the coffee. “This is a disaster.”

Bourbon County Sheriff Bill Martin stopped before leaving the gathering to say the closure has “a dark side.” And Dusty Drake, the lead minister at Community Christian Church, diplomatically said people have “lots of questions,” adding that members of his congregation will lose their jobs.

Yet, even as this town deals with the trauma of losing a beloved institution, deeper national questions underlie the struggle: Do small communities like this one need a traditional hospital at all? And, if not, what health care do they need?

Sisters of Mercy nuns first opened Fort Scott’s 10-bed frontier hospital — a time when traveling 30 miles to see a doctor was unfathomable and when most medical treatments were so primitive they could be dispensed almost anywhere.

Now, driving the four-lane highway north to Kansas City or crossing the state line to Joplin, Mo., is a day trip that includes shopping and a stop at your favorite restaurant. The bigger hospitals there offer the latest sophisticated treatments and equipment.

And when patients here get sick, many simply go elsewhere. An average of nine patients stayed in Mercy Hospital Fort Scott’s more than 40 beds each day from July 2017 through June 2018. And these numbers are not uncommon: Forty-five Kansas hospitals report an average daily census of fewer than two patients.

James Cosgrove, who directed a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office about rural hospital closures, said the nation needs a better understanding of what the closures mean to the health of people in rural America, where the — from diabetes to cancer — is often greater than in urban areas.

What happens when a 70-year-old grandfather falls on ice and must choose between staying home and driving to the closest emergency department, 30 miles away? Where does the sheriff’s deputy who picks up an injured suspect take his charge for medical clearance before going to jail? And how does a young mother whose toddler fell against the coffee table and now has a gaping head wound cope?

There is also the economic question of how the hospital closure will affect the town’s demographic makeup since, as is often the case in rural America, Fort Scott’s hospital is a primary source of well-paying jobs and attracts professionals to the community.

The GAO plans to complete a follow-up study later this year on the fallout from rural hospital closures. “We want to know more,” Cosgrove said. The report was in 2017 by then-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and then-Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), and has been picked up by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). Here in Fort Scott, the questions are being answered — painfully — in real time.

At the end of December, Mercy closed Fort Scott’s hospital but decided to keep the building open to lease portions to house an emergency department, outpatient clinic and other services.

Mercy Hospital Fort Scott joined a growing list of more than 100 , according to data from the University of North Carolina’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. How the town copes is a window into what comes next.

‘We Were Naive’

Over time, Mercy became so much a part of the community that parents expected to see the hospital’s ambulance standing guard at the high school’s Friday night football games.

Mercy’s name was seemingly everywhere, actively promoting population health initiatives by working with the school district to lower children’s obesity rates as well as local employers on diabetes prevention and healthy eating programs — worthy but, often, not revenue generators for the hospital.

“You cannot take for granted that your hospital is as committed to your community as you are,” said Fort Scott City Manager Dave Martin. “We were naive.”

Indeed, in 2002 when Mercy decided to build the then-69-bed hospital, residents raised $1 million out of their own pockets for construction. Another million was given by residents to the hospital’s foundation for upgrading and replacing the hospital’s equipment.

“Nobody donated to Mercy just for it to be Mercy’s,” said Bill Brittain, a former city and county commissioner. The point was to have a hospital for Fort Scott.

Today Mercy is a major health care conglomerate, with more than 40 acute care and specialty hospitals, as well as 900 physician practices and outpatient facilities. Fort Scott is the second Kansas hospital Mercy has closed.

Tom Mathews, vice president of finance for Mercy’s southwestern Missouri and Kansas region, said Fort Scott’s steady decline in patients, combined with lack of reimbursement — as well as the increasing cost of expenses such as drugs and salaries — “created an unsustainable situation for the ministry.”

But Fort Scott is a place that needs health care: One out of every four children in Bourbon County live in poverty. People die much younger here than the rest of the state and rates for teen births, adult smoking, unemployment and violent crime are all higher in Bourbon County than the state average, according to collected by the Kansas Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Ten percent of Bourbon County’s more than 14,000 residents, about half of whom live in Fort Scott, lack health insurance. Kansas is one of under the Affordable Care Act and, while many factors cause a rural closing, the GAO report found states that had expanded Medicaid had fewer closures.

The GAO report also found that residents of rural areas generally have lower household incomes than their counterparts in bigger cities, and are more likely to have limitations because of chronic health conditions, like high blood pressure, diabetes or obesity, that affect their daily activities.

The county’s premature birth rate is also than the 9.9% nationwide, a number that worries Dr. Katrina Burke, a local family care doctor who also delivers babies. “Some of my patients don’t have cars,” she said, “or they have one car and their husband or boyfriend is out working with the car.”

By nearly any social and economic measure, southeastern Kansas is “arguably the most troubled part of the entire state,” said Dr. Gianfranco Pezzino, senior fellow at the Kansas Health Institute. While the health needs are great, it’s not clear how to pay for them.

Health Care’s ‘Very Startling’ Evolution

Reta Baker describes the farm she grew up on, south of town, as “a little wide place in the road.” She applied to the Mercy school of nursing in 1974, left after getting married and came back in 1981 to take a job as staff nurse at the hospital. She has “been here ever since,” 37 years — the past decade as the hospital president.

It has been “very startling” to watch the way health care has evolved, Baker said. Patients once stayed in the hospital for weeks after surgery and now, she said, “they come in and they have their gallbladder out and go home the same day.”

With that, payments and reimbursement practices from government and health insurers changed too, valuing procedures rather than time spent in the hospital. Rural hospitals nationwide have struggled under that formula, the GAO report found.

Acknowledging the challenge, the federal government established some programs to help hospitals that serve poorer populations survive: Through a program called 340B, some hospitals get reduced prices on expensive drugs. Rural hospitals that qualified for a “critical access” designation because of their remote locations got higher payments for some long stays. nationwide get federal “disproportionate share payments” to reflect the fact that their patients tend to have poor or no insurance.

Fort Scott took part in the 340B discount drug program as well as the disproportionate share payments. But, though Baker tried, it could not gain critical access status.

When Medicare reimbursement dropped 2% because of sequestration after the , it proved traumatic, since the federal insurer was a major source of income and, for many rural hospitals, the best payer.

Then, in 2013, when the federal government began financially penalizing most hospitals for having too many patients returning within 30 days, hospitals like Fort Scott’s lost thousands of dollars in one year. It contributed to Fort Scott’s “financial fall,” Baker said.

Baker did her best to set things right. To reduce the number of bounce-back admissions, patients would get a call from the physician’s office within 72 hours of their hospital stay to schedule an office visit within two weeks. “We worked really, really hard,” Baker said. Five years ago, the number of patients returning to Fort Scott’s hospital was 21%; in 2018 it was 5.5%.

Meanwhile, patients were also “out-migrating” and choosing to go to Ascension Via Christi in Pittsburg — which is two times larger than Fort Scott — because it offered cardiology and orthopedic services, Baker said. Patients also frequently drove 90 miles north to the Kansas City area for specialty care and the children’s hospital.

“Anybody who is having a big surgery done, a bowel resection or a mastectomy, they want to go where people do it all the time,” Baker said. Mercy’s Fort Scott hospital had no cardiologists and only two surgeons doing less complicated procedures, such as hernia repair or removing an appendix.

Last year, only 13% of the people in Bourbon County and the surrounding area who needed hospital care chose to stay in Fort Scott, according to industry data shared by Baker.

There were no patients in the hospital’s beds during one weekend in December, Baker said, adding: “I look at the report every day. It bounces between zero and seven.” The hospital employed 500 to 600 people a decade ago, but by the time the closure was announced fewer than 300 were left.

That logic — the financial need — for the closing didn’t sit well with residents, and Mercy executives knew it. They knew in June they would be closing Fort Scott but waited until October to announce it to the staff and the city. City Manager Martin responded by quickly assembling a health task force, insisting it was “critical” to send the right message about the closure.

Relations between Mercy and the city grew so tense that attorneys were needed just to talk to Mercy. In all, Fort Scott had spent more than $7,500 on Mercy Closure Project legal fees by the end of 2018, according to .

Will Fort Scott Sink With No Mercy?

When Darlene Doherty graduated from Fort Scott High School in 1962, there were two things to do in town: “Work at Mercy or work at Western Insurance.” The insurance company, though, was sold in the , and the employer disappeared, along with nearly a thousand jobs.

Yet, even as the community’s population slowly declined, Martin and other community leaders have kept Fort Scott vibrant. There’s the new Smallville CrossFit studio, which Martin attends; a new microbrewery; two new gas stations; a Sleep Inn hotel, an assisted living center; and a Dairy Queen franchise. And the McDonald’s that opened in 2012 just completed renovation.

The town’s largest employer, Peerless Architectural Windows and Doors, which provides about 400 jobs, bought 25 more acres and plans to expand. There’s state promised to expand local highways, and Fort Scott has applied for to expand its airport.

Baker and some of the physicians on Mercy’s staff have been busy trying to ensure that essential health care services survive, too.

Baker found buyers for the hospital’s hospice, home health services and primary care clinics so they could continue operating.

Burke, the family care doctor, signed on to be part of the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas, a federally qualified nonprofit that is taking over four health clinics operated by Mercy Hospital Fort Scott. She will have to deliver babies in Pittsburg, which is nearly 30 miles away on a mostly two-lane highway that has construction workers slowing traffic as they work to expand it to four lanes.

Burke said her practice is full, and she wants her patients to be taken care of: “If we don’t do it, who’s going to?”

Mercy donated its ambulances and transferred emergency medical staff to the county and city.

And, in a tense, last-minute save, Baker negotiated a two-year deal with Ascension Via Christi hospital in Pittsburg to operate the emergency department — which was closed for two weeks in February before reopening under the new management.

But she knows that too may be just a patch. If no buyer is found, Mercy will close the building by 2021.

This is the first installment in KHN’s year-long series, No Mercy, which follows how the closure of one beloved rural hospital disrupts a community’s health care, economy and equilibrium.

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