MINISTRY STATEMENT: Professional Staff

MINISTRY STATEMENT: Professional Staff

Dayspring Family Health Center is a not-for-profit community health center that is founded on the belief that everyone should have access to affordable quality health care. We are committed to providing our patients with comprehensive medical care in a fair and gentle manner. We regard a community as healthy when its members begin life with hope, experience life with joy, and end life with dignity. We are convinced that many health problems have community causes and community solutions. Therefore, our ultimate purpose is to promote the full health—physical, spiritual, mental, and economic—of the communities we serve.

The first sentence in this mission statement distinguishes our health center from many medical practices. This health center’s primary focus has been and remains the delivery of patient care that contributes to community health.

Dayspring’s story began in 1954 with the opening of the Clear Fork Clinic. In the 1950s, coal companies started scaling back their operations in this region of the Appalachia Mountains. Social structures collapsed. Many individuals and families, long dependent on the care of ‘company doctors’, had nowhere to turn for medical care. Their desperation gained national attention in the 1960s. The physicians, nurses, and social workers who in response chose to live and practice here acted in faith--political for some, religious for most. Several such individuals worked together to secure (1976) several hundred thousand dollars annually to subsidize the health center’s efforts to care for as many uninsured patients as possible. Still, ministry--rather than government goals and regulations--continued to be the health center’s heart and identity.

Since the late-1980s, several developments have introduced goals and expectations for the health center that blur our focus on caring for poor patients. First, the health center’s business structure had to become more sophisticated in order to support expanded services—especially in obstetrics—and to satisfy heightened governmental scrutiny of the use of grant-funds. Second, competition with a growing number of private practices for insured patients could not be avoided. Demand could no longer be taken for granted. Third, reduction in reimbursement rates due to the decline in federal funding for uninsured patients and the shift to managed care made cost-containment efforts imperative. Fourth, the resolve to be regarded as the practice of choice rather than the practice of last resort meant submitting the health center’s performance to the most stringent accrediting standards.

Each of these developments continues to require resources--personnel, time, funds. By 1996 the health center faced a fork-in-the-road. One direction would limit ‘ministry’ to an individual matter rather than a professional staff commitment. The other direction would formalize and expand the professional staff’s understanding of the health center’s mission in terms of ‘ministry’. Only one direction would gather a competent professional staff with common ground in ‘ministry’. Only one direction would result in a consensus within the professional staff that patient well-being and community health should be measured by spiritual as well as medical and social criteria. The board’s adoption of the mission statement (effective June 1997) and decision to change the health center’s name (effective February 1998) were anchoring events in the choice to follow the more demanding, exciting, and at times discouraging of these two directions.

As a result, the professional staff of the health center by design consists of individuals whose lives are centered and empowered by Jesus as Savior, Lord, and Example. We come from various faith traditions--Catholic and Protestant. We are learning the crucial art of valuing the strengths and respecting the distinctions of each one’s way of experiencing Christian faith. We, together with our families, seek to live out Jesus’ gospel by living among and caring, in particular, for poor individuals and families. We are grateful to the health center’s board of directors for affirming this resolve. We value greatly our special partnership with the many members of the support staff for whom work with Dayspring is ‘ministry’.

As a professional staff, we experience and assess our ‘ministry’ in several interconnected ways. For instance, we minister as we participate in the healing presence of Jesus--both physical and spiritual--through caring for our patients in the clinics, at home, in the nursing homes, and in the hospital. We minister as we are salt and light in our relationships with the health center’s support staff. We minister as we participate humbly and joyfully in the community life where we live. We minister as we leaven the communities where we live toward being fair and accountable for the most vulnerable citizens. We minister as we model to students and residents entering health care professions a way to focus one’s career on providing the highest quality care to poor and underserved patients. We minister as we deepen our professional life together through spiritual encouragement and accountability. We minister as we protect time to be with and care for our families.

Jesus made it clear that to follow his way of being in the world is to accept risks--such as misunderstanding, a sense of failure, disregard, ingratitude, divided loyalties, temptations to be self-righteous, isolation, burn-out, ridicule, . . . even injury or death. Christian health care professionals who focus primarily on caring for poor and underserved patients face many of these risks as they live in depressed areas where the economic, educational, spiritual as well as medical resources and opportunities critical to being a healthy community are limited. Such risks can threaten our endurance as we attempt to be genuinely present with so many patients who are at far greater risk than are we.

When Jesus spoke of life as “blessed”, we believe he had in mind living in a way that takes seriously the responsibility to respect the disadvantaged members of society. We are refreshed by the many stories we share together that highlight the faith, the courtesy, the simplicity, the wisdom, the generosity, the creativity, the courage, and the humor of those with whom we live and work. And we are learning to find peace and strength in the confidence that we are striving to be near to how Jesus and the Hebrew prophets placed their lives. These ways of reflecting on our experience bring us back to the deep joy of our work.

In light of the hills and valleys in ministering together, the health center’s change from a geographic name--Laurel Fork-Clear Fork--to a ‘vision’ name--Dayspring--has great significance for us. ‘Dayspring’ is an old word that refers to the dawning of day. The King James translation of the Bible uses the word twice. In the story of Job (38:12), God points to the ‘dayspring’ as an example of the life-giving creation over which He is provident. In Luke’s gospel (1:76-79), Zechariah (John the Baptist’s father) refers to the ‘dayspring’ in explaining the meaning of Jesus’ birth--“ . . . whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” The day’s beginning is often associated with mercy, forgiveness, insight, hope, peace. Such experiences of God’s grace are central to why our clinics exist and describe how we want our patients to remember what they receive when they seek our care.

[June 29, 1999]