JEREMY PEPPAS

CAMDEN — The story is becoming a typical one in healthcare.
A smaller hospital in a rural town is rocked when the local economy takes a hit. Maybe the big plant in town shuts down for good or moves elsewhere. The town loses jobs and the local hospital faces hard times.

Camden's Ouachita Medical Center is just one example in Arkansas of such a scenario. CEO C.C. McAllister has been at Camden since 1980 and has seen the town go from a thriving hub built on the defense industry to a town that saw some bad days when General Dynamics and its 1,800 jobs left. That many jobs would be a hard hit even for a big metropolitan area, but for Camden's roughly 14,000 people, it was huge.

But McAllister had a plan and an ingenious one at that.

"It was in 1995 when we went from a county hospital to a 501(c)(3) private, non-profit," he said. "That's when we set up those different entities into corporations under the umbrella."

You see, Ouachita Medical Center is more than just a hospital.

"We have the hospice, nursing home, medical equipment company," McAllister said. It also includes a highly regarded substance abuse program and mental healthcare among other things.

This arrangement is usually seen in bigger systems. McAllister cites St. Bernards in Jonesboro as a system arranged similarly to Ouachita's.
One thing the move did was lower the number of beds at the hospital.

"We now have 98 that are licensed," McAllister said. "We cut it back from 150, but that was when the Feds decided that they would pay better for outpatient services, so much of the space was converted into that."

The system is also Camden's largest employer with slightly more that 600, a far cry from the 1,800 employed by General Dynamics, but a healthcare system being the largest employer in a city is far from unusual.


Substance Abuse
Unfortunately, substance abuse programs are booming.
"Prescription drug (abuse) is on the rise," said Teresa Roark, who runs the substance abuse program at Ouachita Medical Center. "Things like Xanax, … prescription pain killers. Those pain management folks are getting hooked. So they are now buying (drugs) off the street or through the Internet."
Roark said that the in-house patient census is cyclical.

"It's feast or famine," she said. "Sometimes we'll have a full house and sometimes we won't have any at all."

She also added that the patients don't come just from the Camden area.

"We get them from all over," Roark said. "Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, even some from Kansas. Some of it is just where we are located, we aren't that far from lots of big places, but we are a little bit out of the way."

And it is affordable.

"Compared to other programs, we are cheap," Roark said. "That explains why some of the people are coming in from all over. It saves them some money."
There's also no such thing as a typical substance abuse patient.

"Each program is tailor-made," Roark said. "So I couldn't say that each patient stays for about three weeks, because that wouldn't be right. Each patient and each program is different."


Around the Area
Dr. Stephen Tabe, a native of Cameroon who was educated in America, is an ER physician at Ouachita Medical Center in Camden, and lives in nearby El Dorado. He's been at Camden since finishing his residency program in Arkansas, so for most of his career.

Tabe also works in the rural clinics that Camden operates in Stephens and Sparkman, "the really small towns," he said, with a laugh.

"But in the small clinics, you'll typically see people who have had diabetes for a long time, but they don't see a doctor and everything is wrong with them," he said.

"Most of the patients are very complex, a long history of medical problems. But diabetes is a real problem. In Stephens, we're very strong on diabetic care. The goal is to make sure we check their blood sugar, their hemoglobin A1c, their cholesterol, blood pressure."

Camden is one part of what is called the "Golden Triangle" in south Arkansas, or as the locals call it "LA" for Lower Arkansas.

The other parts of the triangle are Magnolia, home of Southern Arkansas University, and El Dorado in Union County, where Murphy Oil Company is headquartered. Even with the Walton billions in northwest Arkansas, Union is still the wealthiest county in Arkansas on a per-capita basis.


April 2007