Sorted by date Results 76 - 100 of 831
Doctors may get all the attention, hefty salaries and steamy medical TV shows, but they are not the only health care professionals who play essential roles in the real-life drama of a hospital. Laboratory teams work with pipettes and samples behind the scenes, performing the tests that doctors use to diagnose illness. Patients at the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium's Wrangell Medical Center can rest assured that their test results are being processed with precision. The center's...
Despite a global COVID-19 pandemic the past two and a half years, influenza — the flu — is still among us. To that end, the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium will hold a flu clinic from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Oct. 22 at the Wrangell Medical Center SEARHC is asking people to call and schedule a time slot to reduce wait time, however walk-ins are still welcome. The clinic was originally scheduled for Oct. 8 but was rescheduled due to a delay in the shipment of vaccines. Between 2010 and 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Pre...
Terry Courson, a firearms instructor and retired police officer, is running for borough mayor. Though he declined interviews with KSTK and the Sentinel, he has posted flyers around Wrangell outlining his stances and experience. Courson served on the borough assembly from 2020 to 2021. He is a fiscal conservative and plans to vote no on the bond issues on the Oct. 4 municipal election ballot, which would finance repairs at the schools and Public Safety Building. Officials believe that the borough can cover the annual debt payment on the $3.5...
After seven years on the borough assembly, Bay Co. manager David Powell is running for another three-year term. Powell's desire to get land out of the borough's hands was what first motivated him to pursue an assembly seat, and he is running again in hopes of seeing his goals completed. If elected, his primary focuses will be selling or leasing the 6-Mile mill property, which the borough purchased this summer, and the former Wrangell Institute property, which was the site of a federally...
Normally, I do not respond to anonymous questions. Most all newspapers, the Sentinel included, will not print anonymous letters. To do otherwise would allow people to take free shots at anyone they want, hiding from view and protecting their own identity while they criticize or question others. However, sometimes the questions raised in an anonymous letter are worth sharing with the community. Such as the case of an unsigned letter mailed to the Sentinel, raising multiple questions about the proposed bond issues to pay for repairs to the...
The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium’s expansion of its long-term care unit at the Wrangell Medical Center remains on target for construction completion at the end of 2022. In June, SEARHC broke ground on an 1,800-square-foot addition to increase the unit’s capacity by four beds. According to Lyndsey Schaefer, director of marketing and communications at SEARHC, the additional beds will be available for use in early 2023. Spots in the 14-bed long-term care unit are “hard to come by,” said Schaefer. Once construction ends and the new...
The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium will switch its food service contractor for the Wrangell Medical Center from NANA Management Services (NMS) to Aramark Corp. The switch in providers, according to SEARHC marketing and communications director Lyndsey Schaefer, was a “business decision.” SEARHC will officially transition from NMS to Aramark on Oct. 1. All 20 current NMS employees in Wrangell will be offered jobs with Aramark, Schaefer said last week. NMS is an Alaska-based, Native-owned company that provides food and security ser...
At 8 a.m. on July 30, Andrew Simmonds, 60, entered the chilling waters of Sandy Beach in Petersburg, setting out to prove that age has not slowed him down. His goal was to swim across Frederick Sound to the mainland, more than six miles away. His journey started months earlier. Soon after arriving in Petersburg in November, Simmonds, who is a physical therapist at Petersburg Medical Center, visited Sandy Beach to gaze out over Frederick Sound. He admired the whales leaping above the water and cr...
The borough will list Wrangell’s former hospital building on a nationwide surplus public property website, hoping for better results than efforts the past two months which resulted in not a single bid. “We’ve got to get rid of this,” Mayor Steve Prysunka said at the July 26 borough assembly meeting. The borough has been paying close to $100,000 a year to keep the building heated and insured, and protected against water damage. The borough ran an online auction in June to sell the property but received no bids. It then offered the buildin...
An additional 40 COVID-19 cases were recorded in Wrangell July 7-13, more than twice as many as in the previous three weeks, according to the Alaska Department of Health website. That’s almost as many cases as were reported in Ketchikan, 43, during the same seven-day period, though the Ketchikan borough has more than six times the population of Wrangell. Of the 713 infections in Wrangell reported to the state since the pandemic count started in March 2020, 172, almost 25%, have come in the past three months. Federal and state health o...
No one bid on the former Wrangell hospital building, which the borough had offered to sell at a minimum asking price of $830,000. The bidding period was open for a month and closed last Thursday. The property is now available for an over-the-counter sale. “It means that the first person to come in to sign an intent to purchase with a 20% down payment (payment in full within 60 days of signing) would be the buyer,” Borough Clerk Kim Lane explained last Friday. “If that happens, I would then take a resolution to the assembly to approve the sale....
No surprise, but the borough received no bids for the former hospital property. No one was willing to pay the $830,000 minimum price for the building, much of which is 55 years old. It’s not like there’s a lot of value to the building, unless a new owner wanted to run a medical center or long-term care facility, which isn’t needed in Wrangell after SEARHC spent $30 million building its new medical center just a few blocks away. Besides, the old building’s health records show a patient in ill health. “Many of the mechanical and electrica...
Two key economic indicators are falling in Wrangell—the unemployment rate, and the number of people in the labor force. Combined, the two datapoints help explain the ongoing worker shortage in the community, stressing out business owners who have to manage as best as they can with too few employees. The unemployment rate for May was 5.1%, down from 5.5% in April, down from 7.2% a year ago, and the lowest in at least the past 12 years, according to state Labor Department statistics. It’s probably the lowest rate going back 20 years or so, but...
The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium has placed its order with the state for COVID-19 vaccination doses for children as young as 6 months old, and could start distributing them to its facilities across the region this week. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday approved the children’s doses of Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. “At this point in time we do not have pediatric vaccine clinics scheduled, as we are waiting for approval and a definite timeframe for receiving our supply of vaccines,” Randi Yance...
The borough is making progress on its long and expensive to-do list. The decisions are not easy and several are costly. Many have been around a long time. That’s not because anyone did anything wrong. Rather, it takes time to confront hard decisions to resolve long-standing problems. And, in many cases, it takes time to find money to pay for the solutions. But the decisions are necessary and deserve the community’s support. After wrangling over multiple options, the Wrangell assembly has put up for sale the former hospital building. The borough...
Did you know that when a child goes to the emergency room at our hospital or their family suffers a house fire or a boating accident, that they can be given a beautiful, comforting teddy bear to snuggle with? These bears are provided by the Beta Sigma Phi sorority and we hope that any family who has a situation where the children could use a comforting friend, that they will ask for one of the teddy bears. The only fundraising event that Beta Sigma Phi holds to raise money for these bears is the Fourth of July pie sale. And it’s a hit every y...
One of Alaska’s largest private COVID-19 testing providers plans to close its public testing sites in the state by the end of June. The decision by the private company will not affect SEARHC’s continuation of testing services in Wrangell. The decision by Capstone Clinic is mainly driven by financial considerations, said Matt Jones, Capstone’s director of non-clinical operations. Jones said it began with an abrupt move by the federal government earlier this year to no longer cover the costs of COVID-19 tests or treatments for those without healt...
A mass casualty exercise June 7 was the first one held at the Wrangell Medical Center in its 16-month-old facility. The drill, which simulated a plane crash, was used to see where improvements could be made in the emergency operations plan. It involved about 70 staff members from the hospital, EMTs and volunteer firefighters. Eleven community volunteers of various ages were made up to resemble victims with head wounds, lacerations and other traumas requiring stabilization, medevac or blood...
The borough has listed the former Wrangell Medical Center for sale to the highest bidder until June 30, at a minimum bid of $830,000, the value assigned by an April appraisal. The hospital has been vacant since health care provider SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium moved into its new building in February 2021. The borough has been spending close to $100,000 a year to heat and insure the empty structure, and the assembly has decided to sell the surplus property. The lot is 1.95 acres, o...
At the assembly’s May 24 meeting, members unanimously approved a resolution setting the property tax levy for this year at 12.75 mills, which is $1,275 on every $100,000 in assessed value, the same rate as last year. The tax rate is 4 mills for property outside the borough’s service area, such as Thoms Place toward the southern end of Wrangell Island and Meyers Chuck. Property tax payments are due by Oct. 15. The borough estimates it will collect almost $1.8 million in property taxes in the fiscal year that starts July 1, with more than 96%...
The borough assembly and SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium have come to an agreement of voluntary payments by SEARHC of $45,000 per year for 10 years on property owned by the nonprofit health care provider in town. In negotiations that began in November, the borough had been asking for $225,000 a year, and SEARHC had asked for a refund on a $331,287 property tax bill it paid in full on the new Wrangell Medical Center in 2021. As a nonprofit, SEARHC is exempt under state law from property taxes. In the agreement approved by the...
The SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium plans to break ground in June on a four-room expansion to the 14-bed long-term care facility at Wrangell Medical Center. The 1,800-square-foot expansion was prompted by the community’s need for long-term care rooms “that are typically hard to come by,” SEARHC spokesperson Lyndsey Y. Schaefer said via email on Friday. SEARHC is adding to the building for the extension, she said Monday, but declined to provide a cost of the construction. “As it’s a pure estimate at this point, I’d rather not...
On June 7, Wrangell Medical Center will hold its annual mass casualty exercise to prepare staff for real emergencies. But they need bodies. “We’re looking for up to 10 volunteers that would be a part of the patient base,” said hospital administrator Carly Allen. “They would play a specific role that would be assigned to them. They would go through a makeup moulage tent, (making ‘wounds’) visually apparent.” A few volunteers have already signed up to participate in the drill, which takes place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., but depending on the roles...
The borough assembly was scheduled to hold a special meeting Tuesday evening to consider an agreement for the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium to make voluntary payments on tax-exempt property it owns in town. A draft agreement had been on the agenda at the assembly’s May 10 meeting but discussion was postponed. Mayor Steve Prysunka is leading the negotiations on the borough’s side, Borough Manager Jeff Good said last Thursday. The borough had started negotiations by asking for $225,000 a year, and SEARHC offered $45,000 per year for...
The borough assembly on Tuesday was to consider a draft agreement for the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium to make voluntary payments of $45,000 per year for 10 years on property owned by the nonprofit health care provider in town. The borough had initially asked for $225,000 a year. SEARHC is not legally required to pay taxes — state law exempts nonprofit religious, charitable, hospital or educational organizations from municipal property taxes — and it has been in negotiations with the borough for several months for a vol...
