This year, the Spokane Journal of Business celebrates 40 years in this community. As the Journal celebrates 40 years chronicling Spokane’s growth, Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center approaches its own milestone — 140 years of caring for this community. While my career represents a sliver of Providence’s legacy, I can say with great confidence health care is changing at a pace unlike ever before.

When I began my career over 40 years ago, urgent care and outpatient clinics were rare. Hospitals were the primary place for care. Patients scheduled for surgery often arrived the night before, were wheeled to the operating room in the morning, and stayed for days. For instance, a pediatric patient receiving a tonsillectomy might remain hospitalized for five days. Patients undergoing cataract surgery spent a week lying in bed with a sandbag over their eyes. There were so many patients with noncritical illnesses staying in the hospital that the patients played bingo using the overhead paging system and our own TV studio housed in the basement of Sacred Heart. Now, tonsillectomy and cataract procedures are done as outpatient procedures, and patients recover at home — a setting that is often better and more comfortable than a hospital.

Hospitals have become the place for high acuity care, like stroke intervention and heart attacks. Outpatient clinics, like urgent care or ambulatory surgery centers, can perform complex procedures that don’t require inpatient hospitalization. For those less complex surgeries, patients can go home sooner than ever. 

Earlier this year, our orthopedic and sports medicine team at Providence Holy Family Hospital performed the region’s first 3D-printed shoulder replacement. The patient, battling a staph infection from a previous shoulder replacement done elsewhere, had struggled to find help until meeting Dr. Jeremiah Clinton. After surgery, he spent two days in the hospital. Six months later, he has 60% mobility back in his arm and is back to fly fishing.

Technology has certainly evolved. We’re identifying illnesses earlier than ever before. The new Ion Robot at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center detected more than 50 cases of Stage 1 lung cancer in its first year, enabling early intervention and improving life expectancy of a disease that was once considered terminal.

Speaking of longer life expectancy — before intervention, suffering a stroke was a life-altering event. Today, as a health care organization in our region with interventional stroke capability, our highly experienced teams can remove clots and can stop a stroke altogether. And with the help of our rehabilitation partners, in our case Providence St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Medical Center, state-of-the-art equipment teaches patients to drive, to shop, and even board an airplane again — giving hope to patients that life can continue after a stroke.

We’ve also learned how to better serve underrepresented communities. National tragedies have exposed disparities in maternal health, particularly among women of color. Too often, Black and other patients of color are not believed when reporting pain. For the past two years, we’ve partnered with Shades of Motherhood during Black Maternal Health Week in April to host a gallery featuring portraits of Black mothers and babies — normalizing representation. Our work around Team Birth further pushes this effort. Team Birth is a patient-centered approach where nurses and doctors focus on the patient’s preferences for delivery. The overarching goal is for safe delivery, while minimizing the chance or need for a cesarean delivery.

Work remains to be done, and our focus is to continue providing those services that fulfill our mission to serve the most poor and vulnerable. It’s going to be tough with the evolving landscape of finances in health care. But we have always faced challenging times and have changed to respond to those times.  Like other industries, health care faces rising labor and supply costs, along with state and federal funding cuts. This will require us to reimagine how we deliver the services our community needs. My chief strategist reminds me this is an evolutionary moment in health care — one for the history books. But we have the map to guide us: our mission. And yet, as I look through the Providence archives, there is a list of changes in programs, structures, and partnerships that have occurred over our nearly 140 years — this reminds me the challenge and change go hand in glove.

With all that said, I would also like to acknowledge what has not changed. People come to us daily needing our care. Many didn’t plan to spend time in a hospital, and we are here for them — at every hour of every day.  And those patients are cared for by people who do this sacred work, whether visible or behind the scenes.

There is a hallway in Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center that is lined with nurses from the former nursing school spanning 100 years — black and white portraits with stern faces. Behind every one of those faces has been a person who cares. A person who cares deeply about the patient, the people they work alongside, and the community they serve. The faces you see in our ministries today, including doctors, nurses, technicians, and support staff, continue this legacy to care and provide high-quality care.

Susan Stacey is chief executive of Providence Inland Northwest.