retiring to Florida because the office pace and increasing documentation demands from Medicare
and other insurances are too much to keep up with at his age.
As a side note, a dissident on the committee keeps talking about the “Swim out of the Weeds”
Fund. This fund was established to teach Lawrenceburg children how to swim. In the early 1940’s
multiple children drowned in Ohio River. A trust fund was set up to assure each child was taught
to swim in the 1st and 2nd grade. The fund has grown to a principle of $1.5 million dollars. The
local school is no longer teaching swimming in this age category because of state mandated
educational requirements. The school has not asked for funding from this source for
the past 2 years. The fund has had no withdrawals from its principle in the past 2 years. There
are very elderly grandchildren to the benefactor family still in the area. The grandchildren have
some direction on the fund, but the fund is managed by the local Farmer’s State Bank. The
meeting was interrupted by the news two siblings were found to have drown in the river.
The hospital is a critical access hospital and is seeing an increase in census and in the number of
patients being transferred out for higher level of care. A new ambulance service has added three
paramedic staffed ambulances responsible just for inter-facility transfers. A for-profit air
ambulance service is negotiating with the county airport authority on placing a base for a medical
helicopter in operation.
You return to the hospital to recover from the mass information gathered at the meeting, and go
through your voicemail. You have an angry voicemail from the ER manager who says her staff is
threatening to leave because they feel overwhelmed with the increased numbers of patients seen,
the unfamiliarity with the new diversity to the area and the recurrence of critical traumas
including 1-2 construction accidents, 2-3 alcohol related accidents daily and a large increase in
domestic violence with 1-2 cases a week as compared to 1 a month a year ago. The most recent
domestic violence incident was a father that shot his wife in front of two kids, then shot at and
killed one child while the other was able to escape. The next voicemail is a request from the
manager of Women’s Services that in the past 12 months there has been a large increase in
teenage pregnancy, a 4-fold increase in deliveries with co-morbid gestational diabetes. She states
the County Child Protection Services Director wants a meeting with you and her because of a
report from two of your L&D nurses who state the increased teenage pregnancy rate is related to
adolescent girls’ infatuation with guys with accents and can be traced back to