CEO Report Notes from February 28, 2024

CEO Report Notes from February 28, 2024
Board Meeting
Ara Chakrabarti, CEO

The following is an outline of comments from the CEO at the recent Redwood Coast Medical Services (RCMS) Board Meeting.
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Community Communication

• On February 10th, four of the six candidates for the California 2nd assembly district came to RCMS. We hosted them for a meeting at EJC and then they visited our main facility. We emphasized to them the importance of what we do and the challenges that we have as the sole provider of E/R like emergency medical care, primary healthcare, mental health care, dental care, palliative and end-of-life care in this remote, isolated, and underserved community. We talked about our role during emergencies, in conjunction with CLSD and our fire departments – how we became a field hospital. We also talked about some of the unfunded mandates that come down from Washington or Sacramento that make our ability to do what we are supposed to do more challenging. We would hope that they were listening.
• Kind of related to this topic – on April 15th, there is something called “Day at the Capital” when healthcare-providing entities in California will meet with the lawmakers to lobby and to emphasize the impacts, both positive and negative, that their legislative agenda has on us. I plan to be part of that activity (been invited) in Sacramento to voice the unique concerns and challenges of rural, isolated, medically underserved communities like us.
• We met with the CLSD BOD this week to update them on our building expansion plan. We also shared with them our Urgent Care financials for the 1st half of this fiscal year. We will continue to share this information with them quarterly. Discussions were meaningful and insightful.     

Organizational/Operational update

• We met with our leadership team (that is our managers, team leads, and project leads) at an off-site meeting on Feb 17th. It was a facilitated planning session and our facilitator was Drew. This is the second of these meetings (and Drew was the facilitator then as well) and we plan to continue to have these with the leadership team every three to four months. As a team, we identify what we will focus on next number of months. We also discussed the status of the initiatives we identified last time we met. The discussions are lively and very valuable and help all of us with a road map of what we all agree to work on as an organization. 
• We have a dedicated Safety and Disaster coordinator on our team now. Chris Behrens joined our team late last year and is leading these activities. Given the critical role we play as a healthcare-providing entity – safety and disaster preparedness, from the perspective of both our patients and our employees, are important functions that need dedicated focus. We are working on these important initiatives under Chris’ leadership.
• Palliative care –After quite a few roadblocks, we believe we have now everything we need to file our application to the State to be approved as a formal Palliative Care provider in our community. These will include our Hospice-like services, Home Health clinical care, Visiting Nurse program, End-of-life clinical care, etc. I want to make a special mention of Lea Seefeldt for coordinating and Lois Falk providing the Clinical Leadership for this important initiative.      
• We are continuing our Annual external audit activities with the auditing firm. It is quite a bit of work for our staff, particularly our financial team. We are expecting the draft audit to be ready in the next 2 to 3 weeks.
• As most of you may know, we are having an “RCMS Black and White and White Night” event at the Sea Ranch Lodge on March 20th evening. This is a ticketed fundraising event which should also allow us to appreciate and thank many of our donors.
• And finally – Facilities. Before we talk about quite a bit of activity that took place over the last month or so on our building expansion initiative, I want to report that we are working through the initiative to replace all the flooring in the upstairs of the main building.

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