The Mettu Children’s Hospital at the Pikeville Medical Center officially opened its doors on Dec. 6, 2021, and immediately began admitting patients to its 10-bed facility. Over the past 11 months, most of those beds have been filled with patients who otherwise would have had to travel two to three hours away for in-patient hospital care.
“When you look at where we are located and draw a circle, it’s about a two- to two-and-a-half-hour drive in either direction for that type of care,” said Donovan Blackburn, the president and CEO of PMC. “You would either go to Lexington or Charleston or Huntington [the latter two in West Virginia].”
The 13,400-square-foot facility was designed to provide medical care suited to children’s needs. “We brought in all our pediatricians, and we brought in all our clinical folks, and said, ‘It’s your facility. Tell us what we need,’ ” Blackburn said. “There’s a lot of extra things—like rounding off the seats and the toilets lowered … things you wouldn’t think about as a normal design.”
Included in that child-friendly hospital environment are 10 private patient rooms with two isolated, a family waiting room, and consultation, treatment, medication and nourishment rooms. The hospital’s outpatient service area consists of 13 exam rooms, along with sick- and well-patient waiting areas.
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“You can walk into Mettu Children’s Hospital, and it’s such an impressive building and such an impressive presentation, that really you’d think you were at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital or Seattle Children’s Hospital, which are some of the best children’s hospitals in the world,” said Dr. Frederick Stine, Mettu’s co-medical director and pediatric hospitalist. “PMC wants to be able to provide expert-level care and also world-class care to the people of this region. The Mettu Children’s Hospital was our way of making that promise to the community and to their families.”
Stine said the staff members are top-notch and are continually training to provide the latest innovations in pediatric care. “We’ve been doing education with our nursing staff and our ancillary staff to make sure we’ve got the best pediatric staff to support some of our sicker kids in our region, so they don’t have to travel hundreds of miles or two or three or four hours just to get the care they deserve,” he said.
While the hospital now eases the travel burden and the subsequent financial strain for inpatient pediatric care, the Mettu Children’s Hospital Specialty Clinic goes one step further. A collaboration between the Pikeville hospital and the University of Kentucky Children’s Hospital, the clinic brings specialists in cardiology, pulmonology and endocrinology to Pike County at scheduled times each month. “[Now], our children who require those sub-specialists don’t have to travel so far to see those folks,” Stine said.
The new hospital and specialty clinic are part of PMC’s larger mission to expand pediatric care in eastern Kentucky. “Though we have great pediatricians not only in our organization but within the community, unfortunately, when there was a need for a higher level of care, a lot of the time, we had to send those patients out,” Blackburn said.
But in 2020, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, located in the main medical center, doubled in size from eight beds to 16, thereby advancing PMC to a Level II Advanced Care NICU.
“We now have the ability that, when babies are born at a lower birth rate or premature, we’re actually able to keep them here at our hospital versus having to send them out to a higher level of care, which separates the mother and the family from the child,” Blackburn said.
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PMC’s Emergency Department also has expanded to serve the younger residents in the region. Blackburn said the pediatric ER has its own entrance, a separate waiting area, child-friendly rooms, and activity centers. In 2019, those improvements earned the department the “Pediatric Ready” certification by the Kentucky Emergency Medical Services for Children Program. Only three other hospitals in the Commonwealth have that designation.
PMC also opened the Appalachian Valley Autism Center in 2021 “to ensure that we are paying close attention to the neediest, more sensitive of our population—those individuals with sensory integration disorders,” Stine said.
The AVA Center provides several types of therapies tailored to the needs of each child, including applied behavior analysis therapy as well as speech, occupational, physical and feeding therapies.
Blackburn said all of the initiatives launched in the past four years, including the opening of the Mettu Children’s Hospital, are only the beginning of providing care for the region’s younger population. “I’m very proud of our work and our accomplishments and where we’re at today,” he said. “If we can take care of 25, 30 or 40 percent of our population without having to send them out, then that’s 25, 30 or 40 percent that will stay home.”