Editor’s Note: This is the second of two columns tracing the history and growth of today’s Southern New Hampshire Medical Center, which is celebrating the 125th anniversary of its founding in 1891. Today’s column takes a look at the hospital’s expansion and growth and the big changes from mid-20th century to today.
Ann McLaughlin had just started her senior year at Nashua High School when, while perusing The Telegraph’s classified ad section one day, she spotted a part-time job opening at Nashua Memorial Hospital.
She got the job, which involved writing out charge slips and pinning them to patients’ account folders. It was September 1966.
Fifty years later, McLaughlin, now Ann French, is still there, although now under the auspices of Southern New Hampshire Medical Center.
And so is Elaine Lavallee, who recalls being one of five students in the hospital’s School of Radiologic Technology, which at the time was a 22-month program – for which she received a $250 scholarship and graduated in June 1974.
Today her title is technologist, and her co-workers number something like 110 – a far cry from the eight full-time technologists and "a handful of students" who made up the department four decades ago.
As went the growth in the hospital’s technological and support fields, so went the evolution and expansion in the medical arena.
Nearly 30 years ago, a newly minted pulmonary specialist had just completed her training at Yale-New Haven Hospital when she looked north toward a rapidly growing region of southern New Hampshire.
"I saw a need here," said Dr. Stephanie Wolf-Rosenblum, the hospital’s vice president of development and external affairs and former chief medical officer.
"I started private practice here in 1988, and saw how fast it was growing," she said, referring to the hospital and its affiliated physicians and staff.
After several years as chief of medicine, Wolf-Rosenblum recalls joining, in 1994, what she calls the first version of today’s Foundation Medical Partners.
"It was something new," she said of the group of about 20 physicians who organized the network of specialists in 1992.
The idea was to streamline patients’ interaction with various physicians and providers, an initiative upon which was built the next generation of collaborative medical practice.
"By the mid-’90s, it was becoming clear that the growth was in evidence-based medicine," Wolf-Rosenblum said, referring to the process by which physicians research the most reliable and up-to-date medical studies in order to pinpoint the ideal treatment for each patient.
Enter the "team approach" model, whereby physicians "came together as a group, a network," she added. "We were all on the same team."
The success of that team approach paved the way for the launch of Foundation Medical Partners, today some 300 providers strong working out of 70 practices in the region.
The team brings together different kinds of experts – those whose expertise is medicine and those whose background is leadership, Wolf-Rosenblum said.
"Being a successful practitioner and being a successful leader aren’t necessarily the same thing," she said. "But our strength comes from that diversity. We have administrators and practitioners working together."
Dr. Gary Dunetz, a urologist who is another longtime Nashua physician, said the transition from private practice to being a member of a large network concerned some doctors at first.
"They were worried they’d have no say, no control" over their patients’ care, Dunetz said. "For years, everyone was in private practice, doing their own thing."
Dunetz, who began practicing in Nashua in 1984 and is the chairman of the surgical division of the hospital’s board of governors, said the evolution from the private practice model to the "multispecialty group" gradually picked up steam by winning over those physicians who were skeptical at first.
"It’s much better than private practice … it’s much more cohesive," he said.
"Doctors look for that now," he added, referring to the network model.
Wolf-Rosenblum agreed, citing the hospital’s recent affiliation with physicians and clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital as an example of "what I think makes this organization unique."
"It’s the key reason Mass. General was interested in partnering with us," Wolf-Rosenblum said of the Nashua hospital’s focus on the network approach.
"It makes a big difference when physicians, nurses, administrators and other (hospital staff) participate in patients’ care," she said.
As for Lavallee and French, such lengthy careers always come with a lot of fond, and often interesting, memories of a different era in health care.
"Medicare was brand new when I started," French said, recalling a "tiny" by today’s standards emergency room that patients and ambulance personnel alike entered through the rear of the building.
"The nurses did all the admitting," she said, recalling them sitting at typewriters and inserting forms with carbon copies to take patient information.
It was around 1980 when the first wave of new technology came to Memorial Hospital, said French, who was by then the supervisor of the admitting department. "We got our first computers. … I remember we still had a plug-in switchboard."
Modernization, at least by 1970s and ’80s standards, was also coming to the radiology department.
"My second year here, we got a new machine to develop negatives," Lavallee said, referring to the pre-digital era, when X-rays – just like photographs – were captured on film, which had to be processed, or developed, in darkrooms.
Some years later, Lavallee narrowed her focus to women’s health – specifically, breast imaging – after her sister-in-law died of breast cancer at age 42.
With her sister-in-law and many other women affected by breast cancer whom she came to know, Lavallee was present in 1987 for the opening of the hospital’s deNicola Breast Health Center.
The designation of the specialty center, named for Nashua physician Paul deNicola, is among the top reasons Lavallee has called Southern New Hampshire Medical Center her employer for more than 45 years.
"The hospital has always been on the forefront," she said, referring to developments in her department and others. "They’ve always kept up with the advances in medical treatment."