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Economic development wears many hats. The term has become a catch-all phrase for bringing more jobs and economic growth to an area. Rural communities throughout the country are all competing for the same thing, though their playing fields can be very different.
Union and Wallowa counties are no exception. Most folks realize that for our region to ensure its future success, we must stimulate more economic growth. But being able to do so while competing against all other rural communities requires some essential ingredients — good infrastructure, quality schools and accessible health care.
We have all three, though in recent years our schools have been challenged by declining enrollments and crumbling infrastructure and doctors have been hard to find — and to keep once they get here.
Enter Grande Ronde Hospital. Over the past several years the hospital — and the region’s health care system in general — has been beset by the retirement or departure of numerous physicians. The ability to recruit, and keep, doctors isn’t just a local phenomenon. Every small community, every rural area, is struggling with the same thing.
What GRH and most rural hospitals have discovered is that few doctors these days are willing to risk their future on setting up private practices. The economic risk is simply too great. So more and more hospitals are getting into the clinic business, just as GRH has done with its children’s clinic and the significant expansion of its Internal Medicine Clinic on Fourth Street.
And the effort is paying off. GRH will be bringing six physicians to the area this year, including a pediatric specialist, a family practice doctor, a surgeon, a couple of internists and a radiologist.
The long drought in doctors might not be over, but the hospital’s efforts should go a long way to helping fill a health care void that has seemed to be growing for many years.
That effort, combined with the opening of a VA clinic in La Grande (which we hope GRH will work closely with), will provide an enhanced health care delivery system for those of us who love to call this area home. It will also help enhance our area’s ability to draw new business and new residents.
In these days of mostly bad economic news, word from GRH that it is bringing in several new doctors is refreshing — and very, very welcome.
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Opinion 
