Altru looks to acquire Devils Lake hospital near the end of March
The business side of the purchase agreement has been agreed to by both Altru and CommonSpirit Health, the owner of the Devils Lake hospital. As CommonSpirit is faith-based, its final step before finalizing the transaction is for the hospital to be taken off the Catholic registry by an office in the Vatican, to Forkel's understanding.
"We anticipate receiving word of that approval any day now," he said.
Altru and CommonSpirit have been working out the acquisition since it
was announced
in June 2024. Altru carried out a months-long period of due diligence, collaborating with CommonSpirit to make the change smooth. Altru put its electronic medical record in place and is training staff and providers on how to use its technology. The hospital will be integrated with the nearby Altru clinic in Devils Lake, so information will all be in the same spot for patients, as well as employees.
Forkel said he couldn't speak to the price of the hospital, but that it was determined through a market evaluation process and Altru will use its cash reserve in the transaction.
Devils Lake Mayor Jim Moe said Altru has visited the city and has met with a potential CEO. Moe said a local resident will be put on the hospital's board of directors, and the CEO will be on some committees in the city. When the transaction has gone through, Devils Lake is planning to hold an event in celebration.
"We'll have an open house and a big celebration of all the hard work of all the entities involved to make this successful," he said.
The hard work Moe referenced is a yearslong conversation about health care in Devils Lake, which gained traction in 2022 and progressed to public meetings attended by community members, health care leaders and U.S. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D.
In January 2022, then-Devils Lake Mayor Dick Johnson wrote a
newspaper op-ed
demanding better health care options for the community and the region.
In October 2022, the city of Devils Lake, the Spirit Lake Tribe, Altru and Essentia Health signed a
letter of intent
to work together to create a new medical campus in Devils Lake. This was followed by several community discussions, such as an August 2023
roundtable with Hoeven
, where he pressed for progress and expressed frustration with what he said was a lack of conversations with CommonSpirit. In October, Tim Bricker, president of CommonSpirit's Central Region,
met with Hoeven and local leaders
, which led to a commitment from the health system to make improvements at the hospital. Some of those
improvements
include emergency room upgrades, which Forkel said are close to being complete.
When the transaction goes through and ER renovations are finished, Forkel said Altru is planning to work on a master campus plan for its entire footprint, starting some time in the summer. For Devils Lake, Altru will explore plans for facilities and technology that need updating.
With a
newly constructed hospital
in Grand Forks, a soon-to-be acquired hospital in Devils Lake and plans to create the master campus plan, this year is going to be big for the health system, Forkel said. In regard to Devils Lake, he voiced thanks to Hoeven for his role in conversations about the hospital.
"I'd be remiss if I didn't also thank Sen. Hoeven for his influence and desire to help create something new in the Devils Lake market related to health care," he said.
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Mental health clinics in violence-prone South Sudan are rare and endangered
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Now that the program's funding from Italian and Greek sources is about to end and its future is unclear. ___ EDITOR'S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at Internationally, many governments and other organizations offer help and information on how to contact them is available online. ___ The clinic is in one of eight locations chosen for a project that aimed to provide mental health services for the first time to over 20,000 people across this East African country. Launched in late 2022, it proved a lifeline for patients like Falatiya in a country where mental health services are almost non-existent in the government-run health system. Implemented by a group of charities led by Amref Health Africa, the program has partnered with government health centers, Catholic parishes, local radio stations. 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Last month, authorities in Juba raised an alarm after 12 cases of suicide were reported in just a week in the South Sudan capital. There were no more details on those cases. Dr. Atong Ayuel Longar, one of South Sudan's very few psychiatrists and the leader of the mental health department at the health ministry, said a pervasive sense of 'uncertainty is what affects the population the most" amid the constant threat of war. 'Because you can't plan for tomorrow," she said. 'Do we need to evacuate? People will be like, 'No, no, no, there's no war.' Yet you don't feel that sense of peace around you. Things are getting tough." In Mundri, the AP visited several mental health facilities in June and spoke to many patients, including women who have recently lost relatives in South Sudan's conflict. In 2015, the Mundri area was ravaged by fighting between opposition forces and government troops, leading to widespread displacement, looting and sexual violence. Ten years later, many have not recovered from this episode and fear similar fighting could resume there. 'There are many mad people in the villages," said Paul Monday, a local youth leader, using a common derogatory word for those who are mentally unwell. 'It's so common because we lost a lot of things during the war. We had to flee and our properties were looted.' 'In our community here, when you're mad you're abandoned,' Monday said. As one of the charities seeking to expand mental health services, the Catholic non-governmental organization Caritas organizes sessions of Self Help Plus, a group-based stress management course launched by WHO in 2021. Attended mostly by women, sessions offer simple exercises they can repeat at home to reduce stress. Longar, the psychiatrist, said she believes the community must be equipped with tools 'to heal and to help themselves by themselves, and break the cycle of trauma." 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San Francisco Chronicle
13 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Mental health clinics in violence-prone South Sudan are rare and endangered
MUNDRI, South Sudan (AP) — Joy Falatiya said her husband kicked her and five children out of their home in March 2024 and that she fell apart after that. Homeless and penniless, the 35-year-old South Sudanese mother said she thought of ending her life. 'I wanted to take my children and jump in the river,' she said while cradling a baby outside a room with cracked mud walls where she now stays. But she's made a remarkable recovery months later, thanks to the support of well-wishers and a mental health clinic nearby where she's received counseling since April. She told The Associated Press that her suicidal thoughts are now gone after months of psycho-social therapy, even though she still struggles to feed her children and can't afford to keep them in school. The specialized clinic in her hometown of Mundri, in South Sudan' s Western Equatoria state, is a rare and endangered facility in a country desperate for more such services. Now that the program's funding from Italian and Greek sources is about to end and its future is unclear. ___ EDITOR'S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at Internationally, many governments and other organizations offer help and information on how to contact them is available online. ___ The clinic is in one of eight locations chosen for a project that aimed to provide mental health services for the first time to over 20,000 people across this East African country. Launched in late 2022, it proved a lifeline for patients like Falatiya in a country where mental health services are almost non-existent in the government-run health system. Implemented by a group of charities led by Amref Health Africa, the program has partnered with government health centers, Catholic parishes, local radio stations. 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In a country heavily dependent on charity to keep the health sector running, access to mental health services lags far behind. The country has the fourth-highest suicide rate in Africa and is ranked thirteenth globally, World Health Organization figures show. In South Sudan, suicide affects mostly the internally displaced, fueled by confinement and pressures related to poverty, idleness, armed conflict, and gender-based violence, according to the International Organization for Migration. 'Mental health issues are a huge obstacle to the development of South Sudan,' said Jacopo Rovarini, an official with Amref Health Africa. More than a third of those screened by the Amref project 'show signs of either psychological distress or mental health disorders,' he said. "So the burden for the individuals, their families and their communities is huge in this country, and it has gone quite unaddressed so far.' Last month, authorities in Juba raised an alarm after 12 cases of suicide were reported in just a week in the South Sudan capital. There were no more details on those cases. Dr. Atong Ayuel Longar, one of South Sudan's very few psychiatrists and the leader of the mental health department at the health ministry, said a pervasive sense of 'uncertainty is what affects the population the most" amid the constant threat of war. 'Because you can't plan for tomorrow," she said. 'Do we need to evacuate? People will be like, 'No, no, no, there's no war.' Yet you don't feel that sense of peace around you. Things are getting tough." In Mundri, the AP visited several mental health facilities in June and spoke to many patients, including women who have recently lost relatives in South Sudan's conflict. In 2015, the Mundri area was ravaged by fighting between opposition forces and government troops, leading to widespread displacement, looting and sexual violence. Ten years later, many have not recovered from this episode and fear similar fighting could resume there. 'There are many mad people in the villages," said Paul Monday, a local youth leader, using a common derogatory word for those who are mentally unwell. 'It's so common because we lost a lot of things during the war. We had to flee and our properties were looted.' 'In our community here, when you're mad you're abandoned,' Monday said. As one of the charities seeking to expand mental health services, the Catholic non-governmental organization Caritas organizes sessions of Self Help Plus, a group-based stress management course launched by WHO in 2021. Attended mostly by women, sessions offer simple exercises they can repeat at home to reduce stress. Longar, the psychiatrist, said she believes the community must be equipped with tools 'to heal and to help themselves by themselves, and break the cycle of trauma." But she worries about whether such support can be kept sustainable as funds continue to dwindle, reflecting the retreat by the United States from its once-generous foreign aid program. The project that may have helped save Falatiya's life, funded until November by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation and the Athens-based Stavros Niarchos Foundation, will come to an end without additional donor funding. Specialized mental health services provided at health centers such as the Mundri clinic may collapse. 'What happened to me in the past was very dangerous, but the thought of bad things can be removed,' Falatiya said, surveying a garden she cultivates outside her small home where a local man has allowed her to stay after taking pity on her. She said that she hopes the clinic will still be around if and when her 'bad thoughts' return. ___
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Atlantic
CDC Staffers Saw the Violence Coming
When gunfire pelted the Atlanta-based headquarters of the CDC yesterday, hundreds of employees were inside the campus's buildings. The experience was terrifying. But some of the employees were not particularly shocked. 'I'm actually surprised it didn't happen sooner,' a nearly 20-year veteran of the agency told me. (She, like others I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of losing her job.) This was, in one sense, the first attack of its kind on the CDC. The shooter, whom law-enforcment officials have identified as Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old resident of an Atlanta suburb, was reportedly fixated on the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine had made him depressed and suicidal. No employees were injured by the bullets that entered the buildings, according to a CDC representative. But an Atlanta police officer named David Rose was shot and later died from his injuries. White, too, was found dead—fatally shot—at the scene. (It is not yet clear if his wound was self-inflicted or if he was killed by police.) When he took aim at the agency on Friday afternoon, he was near a corner where a lone man stands holding anti-vaccine signs nearly every day, several CDC staffers told me. In another sense, public-health workers have been facing escalating hostility since the early days of the pandemic. In 2020, armed protesters gathered on the Ohio Health Department director's front lawn, and the chief health officer of Orange County, California, was met with death threats after issuing a mask mandate. She had to hire extra security and was eventually driven to resign. Anthony Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the country's initial COVID response, has faced regular death threats since 2020. Nearly a third of state, local, and tribal public-health workers reported facing some sort of workplace violence in a 2021 survey. Last year, Fauci told CNN's Kaitlan Collins that threats of violence to public-health workers correlate with verbal attacks from high-profile politicians and media personalities. 'It's like clockwork,' he said. In the second Trump administration, those attacks have become commonplace—the very selling points, even, that have helped a number of Trump's health appointees gain their positions. In 2024, when announcing his own pick for CDC director, President Donald Trump maligned the CDC and other federal health agencies, accusing them of having 'engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation.' Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was already a longtime anti-vaccine activist when he took the mantle as America's health secretary; he has compared vaccinating children to the abuses of the Catholic church. During his own 2024 presidential run, he promised to 'clean up the cesspool of corruption at CDC.' 'Normally, threats to public servants aren't inspired from leadership of their own organization,' another CDC staffer said in a group chat among current and former employees. According to an MSNBC report, during an all-hands meeting today, CDC staff blamed the shooting at least partly on Kennedy's combative attitude toward the agency. 'We need them to stop fanning the flames of hatred against us, stop spreading misinformation,' one employee wrote in the meeting chat, naming Kennedy in the same comment. 'We will not be safe until they stop their attacks against us.' The shooter appears to have brought five guns to the scene, and at least four federal buildings were struck by dozens of bullets. In the hours immediately after the shooting, while many CDC employees remained barricaded in offices and marooned in conference rooms, they heard nothing from Kennedy or Trump. Last night, Susan Monarez, the newly confirmed CDC director, issued a short statement reiterating the basic facts of the shooting. 'We at CDC are heartbroken by today's attack on our Roybal Campus,' she wrote. 'Our top priority is the safety and well-being of everyone at CDC.' Late this morning, Kennedy sent an email to the entire staff of the Department of Health and Human Services offering support and prayers. In a post on X at around the same time, he wrote, 'No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others.' This evening, Monarez sent a more substantial email pledging to support the CDC during its recovery and noting its resilience. 'We have faced adversity before, and we will do so again, drawing strength from our shared commitment to public health,' she wrote. The president has not yet made a statement about the attack. (The White House and HHS did not respond to requests for comment.) To the CDC employees I spoke with, the sluggish response is the latest episode in the administration's escalating abandonment of the agency. Since January, the Trump administration has hit the CDC with massive layoffs, proposed halving its budget, and forced changes to internal policies governing the fundamentals of its scientific work. Earlier this year, Kennedy purged the committee that advises the CDC on vaccine recommendations. Just this week, he canceled nearly $500 million in federally funded research on mRNA vaccines —widely considered among CDC employees and public-health experts to be the greatest domestic triumph of the U.S. pandemic response—stating incorrectly that they cause more risk than benefit against the flu and COVID. For CDC staff, the wider threat does not seem to have passed. This evening, a group of CDC employees were trading tips on peeling off their old parking decals after the agency's security office reportedly asked staff to remove them from their cars. One person suggested covering them with other stickers; another recommended loosening them with cooking oil. Even people who have volunteered for risky missions in their public-health work are still getting used to the idea that the danger has arrived at the home front. 'I've put my life on the line for this agency, responding to outbreaks in some of the most dangerous parts of the world,' a 13-year veteran of the agency told me. 'I didn't expect to face the same risks at the Atlanta campus as I faced in South Sudan.'
