COMMUNITY IMPACT: Merit Health Natchez shares program, staff. . .
Merit Health Natchez adds nurses, specialists and pain management services, reports fewer infections and top-tier patient reviews, and details a $107 million community impact. Kevin Samrow is the CEO at Merit. . .
Merit Health Natchez adds nurses, specialists and pain management services, reports fewer infections and top-tier patient reviews, and details a $107 million community impact. Kevin Samrow is the CEO at Merit Health Natchez. FILE PHOTO | THE NATCHEZ DEMOCRATNATCHEZ — Merit Health Natchez invited community stakeholders to lunch this week to share exciting news and updates from the hospital. With this came announcements of new nurses and physicians joining the staff at the hospital. While — like all rural community hospitals — Merit Health Natchez struggles to compete for nurses and specialty doctors, the hospital has recently added 15 new nurses, an orthopedic surgeon and a new interventional pain management program and urology department to its rotation of providers. Dr. William Porter joined Merit Health Natchez in May as its new, full-time orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Ryan McGahey, pain interventionist, comes to Natchez once per week or two to four times per month from Jackson, depending on the volume of patients who require those services, said Merit Health CEO Kevin Samrow. “The amount of wonderful feedback we’ve had about bringing pain management to this market has been remarkable,” Samrow said. “This is interventional pain management. It’s not a pain pill mill. They’ll get their injections or their physical therapy and whatever they need. ”Dr. John Fagan, urologist, joins the team once per month from Vicksburg. “We also had one of our nurse practitioners train with him and she is now seeing urology patients in the clinic,” Samrow said. “Porter has been coming here for many, many years and we talked him into moving here. ”Additionally, Dr. Geoffrey Flattman joins Dr. Christopher Martin full-time in the general surgery department after practicing independently. “We’re excited to have kept him here in Natchez,” Samrow said. PATIENT SATISFACTIONOn one of the hardest to please platforms, Google reviews, Samrow proudly announced that Merit Health ranks on top of national averages. Overall, the hospital rating is 4. 5 out of 5 stars. The national average is 3. 1, Samrow said. While the hospital Emergency Room satisfaction rating leaves room for improvement with only 3. 9 stars, it still beats the national average of 3 stars. Meanwhile, the ratings for the hospital’s individual clinicians and nurse practitioners are near-perfect five stars across the board, Samrow said. Aside from these ratings, Samrow said Merit Health Natchez has shown improvements in measurable patient outcomes as well. “Hospital-acquired infections have decreased 76 percent from 2024 to 2025 and continue to go down," Samrow said. “We’ve had zero patient safety indicators since February 2025 through today and zero CDFs (Clostridium Difficiles) in 2025 through 2026. ”CDFs are bacterial infections most commonly spread in hospitals. Additionally, 619 days have passed since the last MRSA diagnosis — a strain of staph that poses a serious risk for hospitalized patients. Urinary catheter utilization and infection rates are also down. “That doesn’t happen by accident, by the way,” Samrow said. “That happens by changing priorities, changing policies and by talking about this on a daily basis to make sure we’re not doing things that would cause any of those problems. . . . This shows that there’s intentionality here that we’re doing right by our patients and improving in areas that we want to continue to improve. . . . These are things that some of you may have never even heard of but things that we look for every day to make sure that we’re providing excellent care for our patients. ”LOOKING AHEADSamrow said focused priorities for the hospital today include improving throughput times in the ER by safely transitioning ER patients to the inpatient wards or to discharge faster. “The quicker we can do that, the more quickly we can get to the next patient in need,” he said. Also, recruitment of more physicians and nurses always remains a priority, Samrow said. “We are competing for every nurse and every doctor against every hospital in the country and it is a very difficult process, especially to recruit them to smaller towns that they are not from,” Samrow said. “I’m proud to say that we started 15 new nurses this week here in Natchez. . . . And we continue to look at different specialties of things we need. ”Still to come, Amber Hawthorne, nurse practitioner, starts work later on this summer and Dr. Robert Tatum, internal medicine physician and pediatrician, will start practicing in August 2027 in Natchez after finishing residency, Samrow said. MERIT IMPACTLast year alone, Samrow said Merit Health had 111,000 patient encounters, which boils down to roughly 9,300 patients each month. This includes 512 baby deliveries and 19,000 ER visits in 2025. “We’re not a small mom and pop shop. There are not many businesses in town that have 9,300 customers each month,” he said. “We had $37 million in uncompensated care and had $3 million in capital investments and $31 million in payroll,” with roughly 400 employees, 300 of them full-time. “We buy gas here, we pay taxes here and we buy groceries here. All of that is helping out with schools, fire and police services. $31 million in payroll is a big deal in Natchez Mississippi,” Samrow said. As for capital investments, Samrow said some of these were updating all of the hospital computers as well as improvements and additions of a new radiology room, a new 64 slice CT scanner, and other upgraded GE imaging tools, which provide for more accurate and faster diagnosis with clearer images. Merit Health Natchez is also a taxpaying entity, having paid out $5 million in taxes in 2024, Samrow added. “Our overall community impact in 2024 was around $107 million,” he said. Merit Health also broke records with its annual Jars of Love peanut butter drive, while gathering 3,039 jars of peanut butter to donate to community food banks. In four years, Merit Health Natchez has collected 8,000 jars of peanut butter, continuing to increase the number each year, Samrow said. Merit Health Natchez also boasts a robust robotic surgery program, where Dr. Flattman is one of the proctors for Intuitive — the manufacturer of the robot — and teaches other doctors around the country how to use it, Samrow added. Story TagsEmail EXTRASign up for the daily 5 a. m. Natchez Democrat morning news digest