Hospital board talks new physician hires, importance of organ donation

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SHERIDAN — Sheridan Memorial Hospital is continuing its search for additional physicians to meet growing community needs. While the search widens, the board of trustees is considering expanding local education on the positive impacts of organ donation.

CEO Mike McCafferty said progress is being made in hiring new physicians — two new internal medicine physicians have been hired and are set to begin working in October. In July 2024, those two will be joined by a new rheumatologist. Still, SMH continues the search for additional physicians to meet community needs.

"We’re continuing to work with other hospitals, family medicine physicians, we’re working with our pediatric group in terms of growth in pediatrics and we’re working with our anesthesia group… We’re also looking at medical oncology," McCafferty said. "Every year we evaluate what our demand is for physicians based on our population, so we just finished up our most recent physician analysis and it looks at our physician level… We’re pretty strong from the perspective of our medical staff and we feel really good that things will continue to grow."

As the services provided by SMH have grown over the past year, so too has the need for additional physicians, McCafferty said. The hospital's primary care practice debuted in August 2022 and the transitional care unit in September 2022, adapting to the needs of the Sheridan community and leaving room for further growth of the hospital.

While the search for additional physicians continues, the SMH board of trustees is advocating for the promotion of local education on organ donation — trustee Ron Mischke said Sheridan County exists within the national average of organ donors, but an increase in numbers could come as a huge benefit to patients in need around the world.

"They’ve used corneas in Colorado for education. One actually went to Malaysia and one went to China, so international organ donation is a very big deal," Mischke said.

Operating Room Manager Brent Maurhoff said expanding education and advocacy for organ donation locally could help people to better understand the positive impacts of organ donation.

"It's very dependent on the family, the situation and whether somebody's on the donor registry, so it's all about educating and getting the word out into the community of how valuable these programs are and how they can benefit people, not only locally but nationally and internationally," Maurhoff said.

Shelby Kruse started as the public safety reporter in November 2022.

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