Unalaska, AK – According to the recently released community vision statement, two of the community's top ten priorities focus on the Iliuliuk Family Health Clinic. Priority number six is to improve clinic administrative functions, such as billing, scheduling, and customer service. Clinic executive director Sonia Handforth-Kome said the clinic is already addressing those issues.

"Certainly today I have staff going to customer service training. We have on-going customer service training. We had the problem last year, almost a year ago now, that we had some pretty extensive turnover in our admin department. So what we are trying to do is decrease turn over and increase training."

She also said that the new electronic records management system helps keep administrative matters organized. Handforth-Kome says some scheduling problems might stem from a lack of space; it's hard to fit more patients in each day unless they get more exam rooms and expand the facility. However, that would require more funding and more community support.

The community vision also lists creating a regional hospital as priority number eight.

"Now as far as hospitals go, that is something that is going to be ultimately up to the entire community because the way hospitals are funded is different than the way this clinic is funded," Handforth-Kome explained. "And there would probably have to be city funding, possibly even tax funding to support a hospital in this area."

But questions about creating a hospital go beyond funding issues. Handforth-Kome said building a full-fledged hospital in the area may not be the best thing for the community. She said that in some ways a hospital designation is not much different than a Frontier Extended Stay Clinic, it just costs more money. She said it might be dangerous to offer some complicated services out here, like surgeries, because we don't have any back up.

"Our reality is that to get our patients to the next higher level of care is still a minimum of three hours if there's a plane on the ground and more like five to eight to ten to twenty hours otherwise. And that's scary. That's scary for providers. They don't want to have to do something, have a complication, and have no back up."

But the clinic does want to know what community members think they need to do to improve and possibly expand the services. The clinic's board is hiring a company to complete a community health needs assessment later this month. Through focus groups and other information gathering methods they will assess what the community wants from the clinic and what it can support.

If you have comments on the clinic and how it is run, Handforth-Kome said she would be happy to discuss them.