ENTERPRISE — Oregon health officials, including Wallowa Memorial Hospital’s Dan Grigg, gathered Wednesday, Jan. 22, for a virtual conference on what they want to see happen in the 2025 Legislature.

“There are so many priorities in the state, it’s hard to say what (the Legislature) will prioritize,” Grigg, the CEO of Wallowa Memorial, said reflecting on the Hospital Association of Oregon meeting.

One thing Grigg stressed is that Wallowa Memorial is in sound financial shape. After one speaker noted that the latest data — from 2024 — shows that more than half of Oregon hospitals are consistently in the red, Grigg said that’s not the case at Wallowa Memorial.

He said that former CEO Larry Davy did a good job getting the hospital out of debt.

“We’re in a good position here,” he said.

However, like most health care institutions, payroll eats up about 50% of costs.

“We do try to make sure people are paid fairly,” he said. “There’s so many needs in health care. … Many need education.”

The difficulty in finding a place to live is part of the problem in filling the many vacant health care jobs, he said, as is the higher cost of living in the area.

“But I don’t think that’s the biggest deterrent,” he said.

Grigg started his input Wednesday with a story about when he was 13 and his mother was about to give birth to his youngest brother. They lived in Green River, Wyoming, and rather than traveling to a town 15 minutes away, they chose to drive three hours to Ogden, Utah.

Partway there, they “pulled over on the side of the road and delivered my brother in the back of the ambulance.”

He said his mom and brother were all right, but “not everyone is so lucky.”

He said he has read that people often figure a bigger hospital is more likely to be better. But that’s not always the case. He noted that of six counties in rural Eastern Oregon — Wallowa, Baker, Morrow, Grant, Harney and Lake — only four have hospitals that deliver babies.

“There’s a combined population of 60,000 people in an area of 31,000 square miles, the size of South Carolina,” he said. “And there’s only four hospitals in those six counties that deliver babies.”

He said Baker and Morrow counties no longer offer maternity and obstetrics care.

“Hospitals only get paid when they deliver a baby, but they must have anesthesia providers, delivering doctors, C-section-trained doctors, trained nurses always available and on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said. “The costs for these standby services are tremendous, but you can’t have a program without them.”

According to a study he cited, it costs the average rural hospital about $1 million a year to keep all those maternity and obstetrics professionals.
Grigg said the four hospitals he referred to average fewer than 50 births a year.

“When a rural hospital is financially sound, they can subsidize these costs,” he said. “When finances are rough, it’s between closing (obstetrics) or closing your hospital.”
He said neither is going to happen in Enterprise.

“We’re super-committed to keeping OB as long as we can,” he said. “We’re solidly behind that program.”

Grigg said government help is needed for health care costs. He noted that U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., recently sponsored a bill to include “standby pay” for small hospitals. The standby pay would cover the cost of those teams hospitals need to have on call for obstetrics emergencies.

He hopes the legislature can do something similar.

“It would go a long way if we could also have something like that at the state level,” he said.
Becky Holtberg, president and CEO of the Hospital Association of Oregon, agreed, saying the association hopes to get the legislature to take action to support and strengthen community hospitals “to preserve access to care for Oregonians across the state.”

Also joining the conference were Sean Kilmer, executive vice president of external affairs at the association; Becca Thompson, communications director for the association; Cheryl Wolf, CEO of Salem Health and a registered nurse; Daniel Davis, an RN who manages St. Charles Health System’s patient discharge process; and several journalists who posed questions.

Grigg’s recommendation that the legislature boost funding for small, rural hospitals had the group’s full support.

“We’re committed to keeping our OB services open and available for our community as long as we can,” he said, fretting about the alternative. “If we don’t provide that service, the community will be driving up to an hour and a half to the next-closest hospital in La Grande.”