SEARHC is the largest health care provider in Southeast Alaska, with facilities in 15 communities and traveling services for 13 more towns across the region. Its largest operations are in Juneau, and in Sitka and Wrangell where it operates hospitals in the two communities.

The half-century-old health care nonprofit has about 2,000 employees and has served more than 42,000 patients, according to the 2025 numbers on its website. Those patients used SEARHC services more than 330,000 times last year.

The Wrangell Medical Center, which opened in 2021 at a cost of about $30 million, is the largest employer in town. One-quarter of Wrangell’s economy came from health care jobs, as measured as a percentage of the community’s workforce wages, according to a 2025 report prepared for the borough by the economic consulting firm Rain Coast Data.

That’s an even higher percentage than the 18% of the labor force income in Sitka, where SEARHC runs its largest hospital and extensive health care campus.

Under the terms of its 2019 contract to purchase the Sitka Community Hospital, SEARHC agreed to hold an annual listening session in Sitka to hear from residents. Though no such agreement was part of the 2018 deal for the health care provider to take over Wrangell’s hospital operations, there’s no reason SEARHC could not hold a similar annual public meeting in Wrangell.

It should do for Wrangell what it does in Sitka. The organization is as big a part of Wrangell’s life as it is in Sitka.

This year’s Sitka community meeting was held April 6, drawing about 40 people to the two-hour session to share their ideas, concerns, compliments and questions. Staff from Spruce Root, a Native-owned business development organization, helped run the meeting and will create a report on the evening’s public input to share with SEARHC leadership.

People at the Sitka meeting broke into small groups to discuss patient services, access and coordination of care, communication and ideas to improve all of the above.

Of course, to be productive, any public listening-and-talking session should be constructive and not deteriorate into personal complaints and gripes, or medical privacy issues. But with those limitations, it would be helpful for SEARHC to hear from Wrangell residents and for the community to hear from SEARHC.