Mike Donlin Quotations

Several years ago, we looked back and saw there were going to be some very special anniversaries to plan for. This year will see the 50th anniversary of the Auxiliary and the 40th anniversary of the 1966 purchase of Sacred Heart Hospital from the Sisters of St. Francis in Dubuque.

If we can raise the money in a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, that's great, we'll get started on the project right away. If the fund-raising goes more slowly, we may need to look at other things the hospital can do to help. That might mean providing a bus for transporting dialysis patients back and forth to Sioux City.

We have some plans for expanding Park Place Estates, but it's not yet on the calendar. The cost for that would be about $375,000. Right now, we're looking for when we can put it on our timetable.

We don't want to be somebody who just dumps something in the museum's lap and then leaves them to figure out how to take care of it. So, our partnership is more than the donation. We've been providing some in-kind labor, as well.

We wanted to do some special things to help celebrate. I've had the occasion to frequently visit the Plymouth County Historical Museum. As I've looked around, I've noted there really isn't a rich deposit of medical and healthcare history there.

We're disappointed. Ours is an adult-kind of place unlike convenience stores, and it's not an area where people worry about kids playing the games.

End-Stage Renal Disease has been a long-standing challenge for the community. It's never raised itself in terms of volume of patients to be a huge need, but it's really an incredible inconvenience for the patients and their families.

Five years ago, we studied the issue of dialysis to see what Floyd Valley Hospital could do to help. Since I've been here, we had studied the issue twice before and found wasn't feasible for us. The last time we studied it, we found it wasn't feasible unless we were able to knock down some of the costs so we could better subsidize the losses we could expect.

The first priority that was identified was to upgrade the patient rooms. We're going to put out a request for proposals soon to get people designing projects for us.