Doctor, 81, keeps Arkansas hospital open

MURFREESBORO, Ark. - An elderly doctor has come out of retirement to keep the sole hospital in Pike County open after it lost a three-member medical staff. Dr. Hiram Ward, 81, who began his practice in the rural Arkansas county five years before Pike County Memorial Hospital was built in 1958, became the hospital's only medical staff member in January.

Ward provided doctor's care to patients at the 32-bed hospital by himself until last week when Dr. Tommy Gray, who lives 148 miles away at Conway, heard about the hospital's plight and began helping out temporarily, says hospital administrator Rosemary Fritts.

"I volunteered to come out of retirement," Ward says. "Nobody asked me to. I came back so that our hospital would stay open."

The hospital employs 55 people and is the second-largest employer in Murfreesboro behind the school district. With the hospital struggling financially, county voters in December approved a three-eighths-cent sales tax to boost its revenues.

But the following month, Drs. Phillip White and Mark Floyd announced they could no longer continue seeing patients at Pike County Memorial because their malpractice insurer had discontinued coverage for their hospital work. A third doctor had retired previously.

Although the hospital's patient referral list has declined with patients referred to larger hospitals in Hot Springs, Nashville and Texarkana, Ward says there is no substitute for the kind of care people get at the hospital in Murfreesboro.

"We have a coronary care unit and we do stabilize people who have heart attacks and send them off to get bypasses and stents put in," Ward says. "Quite a few of them would lose their life if the hospital wasn't here."

He says some physicians in the new generation don't know patients.

"They don't know how to correlate the problem with the patient's environment and their family setting," Ward says. "The family setting means a lot: what kind of job you're doing and the situation you are in. Whether you are getting along with your wife or not.

"We've known these people forever. It's like taking care of them at home," he says. "It's important to people and you feel much more secure. A big part of getting better is the faith you have in the doctor."

Ward was the only doctor in the county at one time. Briefly after he started his practice in 1953, another doctor in the county died. Ward remembers once he saw 132 people in a 24-hour period. He was paid $2 for an office call and $3 if he made a house call.

Ward plans to retire — again — as soon as the hospital signs contracts with two physicians to work there. Hospital officials say Pike County Memorial will continue to have physician coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week as they actively recruit physicians to the area.