Eureka Springs Hospital bars chief of staff

Eureka Springs Hospital last week terminated its agreement with Emergency Staffing Solutions, the company that the hospital had partnered with since October 2023 to run its emergency room.

Dr. Gary Parkhurst, who had served as medical director and emergency room chief of staff, told the Times-Echo that he was barred from entering the hospital on Wednesday, Jan. 29.

“I was called by ESS, that would have been last Wednesday,” Parkhurst said on Wednesday, Feb. 5. “They said there was a situation at the hospital and wanted me to go up, and so I did. And when I got there, the front desk clerk kind of met me at the entrance and said that she was instructed not to let me in the hospital. So that’s how I found out what what was going on there.”

Parkhurst, who had worked at the hospital for 10 years, said he had noticed a change in his relationship with the hospital administration since he joined several staff members in signing a letter outlining their concerns about the behavior of chief financial officer Cynthia Asbury and human resources director Jodi Edmondson.

“I didn’t compose the letter, but I did willingly sign it, just in support of my staff,” Parkhurst said. “I personally have not had adverse interactions with the administration up there, but I just kept hearing a lot of reports about bullying, frankly, and intimidation and just kind of an overbearing, authoritative, non-collaborative kind of approach with the staff. … Then I began noticing after that my communication, as chief of staff with the current administration — and that being just primarily two people, it was the CFO and and the interim CEO who was the H.R. person — I just began to notice that they weren’t reaching out to me, communicating with me about much. And so I knew something was suspicious.”

The letter signed by hospital employees was compiled by then-chief nursing officer Jessica Petrino and emailed to members of the Eureka Springs Hospital Commission on Nov. 3, 2024, two days after the commission voted at a special meeting to terminate chief executive officer Angie Shaw. The following day, Nov. 4, the commission held three special meetings, voting to terminate Petrino, place Asbury on a 60-day Performance Improvement Plan to be monitored by the commission and appoint Edmondson as interim CEO.

Shaw and Petrino each have filed wrongful termination lawsuits in Carroll County Circuit Court.

The letter emailed to commissioners describes a series of complaints from staff members regarding Asbury and Edmondson and requests that they be terminated. The letter lists the names of 14 individuals, nine of whom signed the letter. The letter indicates that the other individuals listed gave their verbal approval. Parkhurst’s name and signature are at the top of the list.

“I figured I probably didn’t garner a lot of goodwill by signing that letter,” Parkhurst said. “So I wasn’t surprised, frankly. And then I noticed over the last few weeks that Jodi Edmondson, whom I primarily tried to communicate with anyway, which I felt was the appropriate channel, wasn’t responding to my texts or returning my phone calls. So I knew something was definitely amiss. And so it didn’t take me by surprise, frankly, when I got up there and was told that. I just felt bad for the lady who had to tell me that. She felt terrible about it and very apologetic.

“I said: ‘It’s absolutely not a problem. I have the door code. I’m going in anyway.’ And did.”

Parkhurst said he spoke with an emergency room doctor from 360 Medicine, the company that now has an agreement with the hospital.

“I just shared my thoughts, which he was very appreciative,” Parkhurst said. “He was just kind of caught in the middle and I think he was just very surprised and taken aback as much as anyone else.”

As of Wednesday, Feb. 5, Parkhurst said he had not received any formal notice that he is no longer the hospital’s chief of staff, “except that I wasn’t allowed in the building.”

“…Again, it didn’t surprise me, just because that’s the way they had been handling things for really a year and a half, probably, maybe a little longer. Just devoted, even many long-term, competent, skilled staff members just treated like that, just no explanation, no reasons offered, just told to leave or escorted out by the police. Just unbelievable.”

‘Dumbfounded’

Parkhurst said he is shocked that the hospital commission and the city council haven’t done more to address the repeated complaints from current and former members of the hospital staff.

“I am dumbfounded, as many are, as to why actions haven’t been taken to remediate this thing and make some drastic changes, because clearly, it’s not a military organization,” he said. “You can understand running things the way they are if you have a strict military style or chain of command. Hospitals do have a chain of command, but it’s not that type of structure. It has to be more collaborative, is what I’m getting at.”

Parkhurst said it’s “highly irregular” for clinical staff to have frequent interaction with financial administrators.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve sat in on a number of med staff organizational meetings through the years at different hospitals,” he said. “And I can’t recall — I mean, I actually kind of paused and thought about it at one point. Unless they were invited to a med staff meeting to maybe discuss proposed changes in the budget or some sort of project or something like that, I don’t recall ever having knowledge of a CFO attending and having their hand in so many day-today affairs, especially clinically related matters. It is just very odd.”

“… I don’t understand it,” Parkhurst said. “And then at the last med staff meeting, it was actually Cynthia that gave pretty much all the replies and made most of the comments as I directed the meeting, not Jodi, the CEO, who typically is the one who gives us the reports and answers most of the questions. So, very unusual. Very irregular to me.”

Parkhurst described the situation at the hospital as “very sad and unfortunate.”

“Not just for me,” he said. “There are many good, competent, devoted people that have been at that hospital for, a lot of them, quite a while, much longer than me, that were treated worse than I was treated, for no reason. No apparent reason. The strangest part of it to me is, I just don’t understand why the commission and the city council don’t seem to be hearing all these people that have a consistent story, basically. That’s what struck me. This is not one or two people who have a personality conflict with a person in administration. This is a consistent theme. These people, who I know to be of good character for the length of time I’ve known them, would have no reason to be fabricating this stuff. They’re all essentially kind of relating the same pattern here.”

Agreement terminated

Sandy Martin, chair of the hospital commission, said by email on Wednesday, Feb. 5, that ESS was notified on Thursday, Jan. 30, that its agreement with the hospital was being terminated.

“They were on a staffing contract,” Martin wrote.

“Our attorney handled the termination.