Dr. Broomfield hoping to bring personal touch to Kimball hospital

Kimball Health Services has hired a new Chief of Staff to replace Dr. Plate after he starts his retirement on August 27.

Dr. James Broomfield, who has practiced medicine for 24 years, will be starting work Sept. 8 at Kimball Health Services. Broomfield, 50, served as Chief of Staff of Cheyenne Regional Medical Center from 2009 to 2012 and currently serves as Associate Chief of Staff at the VA hospital in Cheyenne.

Though Broomfield has spent several years in Cheyenne, he is no stranger to Kimball. In fact, at times when Dr. Plate was out of town, Broomfield would come to Kimball Health Services to help with patients.

"One of my jobs, the clinical aspect of it when I worked at Cheyenne Regional, was I did some outreach, and on the weeks that Dr. Plate did not come there and do procedures, I would come over and do procedures. And so I got to know a lot of the folks in Kimball at that time, and when I ended my employment with Cheyenne Regional, the biggest drawback to leaving Cheyenne Regional was the interaction I had with the folks in Kimball," Broomfield said.

However, it wasn't long after Dr. Plate announced his retirement that Broomfield received a call from Kimball Health Services CEO Ken Hunter asking him if he'd like to return to the hospital, this time as Chief of Staff. Broomfield states that it didn't take much time at all for him to accept the offer.

"I know the folks very well, and I'm excited to get to come back. So it's not a new thing. It's a comeback. And you know, Kimball is a small town like I was raised in. It's more progressive than my hometown was, but it's a small town, farming community. I understand the folks that are there and the values, the things that sort of make life are the people in Kimball. I really enjoy the community and the people that are there," Broomfield said.

Broomfield, an Arkansas native, recalls always having an innate curiosity about the world and how processes within the body worked growing up as the son of an optometrist. This curiosity is what drove him initially to pursue the medicine field.

"It was just I love science. I loved how animals worked. Being on my grandfather's farm as a kid, I remember always trying to figure out [things]. I would take the eyeballs and cut them up. I would take the liver and look through it and try to figure out how everything worked. And that was from a pretty young age on that I was always cutting, always looking at what was making things happen," Broomfield said.

Broomfield earned a BS in Zoology from the University of Arkansas in May 1986 after which time he went to University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences where he earned his MD in 1990 before going into his three year internship and residency at the University of Utah at Salt Lake City from 1990-1993.

After working in private practice in Park City, Utah after finishing up his residency, Broomfield took a position at Lake District Hospital in Lakeview, Oregon where he met Dr. Bill Strievy, who would become both his mentor and a model for the kind of physician he wanted to be himself.

"He practiced for 55 years. He worked up until the day he died. And boy, he was a gentle soul. And he had some of the most unique personalities of different doctors that he worked with, and he always managed to get consensus, to get people to think about the patients. When I interviewed out in Oregon to work with him, we opened up the phone book, and I just started naming names. And he didn't need a chart, he knew about every single one of the patients in the phone book," Broomfield said.

Though Broomfield concedes that the city of Lakeview was approximately about the size of Kimball and, therefore, it wasn't many patients to remember, he was impressed by Dr. Strievy's knowledge of not only the patients but also their brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents and significant events in their lives.

"He knew about them. And I did see his filing cabinet, and it was 3x5 cards. And wow, that was impressive that he knew everybody that well, and he knew all of those family ties. He also knew all the dirt on everybody, but that didn't change his compassion for them. And the spirit of taking care of everybody in the community, that one played a huge role in me looking for a community like Kimball," Broomfield said.

It is this approach of personal knowledge and closeness that Broomfield wishes to bring to his patients here in Kimball when he starts work next month, getting away from the temptations of the technological age to simply stare at the electronic medical records instead of paying direct attention to the patients he sees.

"We all go through electronic health records now, and I'm not a very good typist. I actually text better with my phone than I can type. And the sad news is that we'll sit there and spend the entire time looking at the computer screen and then we've never actually looked at the patient. It's happened to me. I'm not sitting there blaming others. I do it to people, and other people have done it to me when I've gone for my health care. We've got to develop the personal touch. We've got to start looking each other in the eye and being a part of a team that works with all the patients to make their health care decisions," Broomfield said.

He also wants to make sure that there is a cohesion and a focus throughout the staff so that patients continue to get quality care and that nothing falls by the wayside.

"My excitement about coming to Kimball is I've worked now with the VA. I've worked for Cheyenne Regional. I've seen a lot of things that do work and don't work, and the ability that I would like to bring to the table is the need to create a uniform team that understands that we are working in an imperfect system right now and that we have to stick together. Because when we don't, we wind up allowing patients to suffer," Broomfield said.

Broomfield desires to create a core group of physicians in Kimball that are not merely killing time until moving on to their next location but who love the community and truly care for the people.

"You can't have people coming in one week and then they're gone the next. You've got to have a stable community. This is one of the things that the hospital administration has brought to me as something we've got to work to stabilize. We can't have people leaving. We're going to have people leave. We're going to have people that show up with spouses and children and things like that, that impact decisions. We've got to develop, over time, a core group of individuals that really want to be there and want to take care of the community in the long term," Broomfield said.

For Broomfield, he states that he's in it for the long haul, expressing a desire to have Kimball be his last place of employment before eventually retiring.

"I've been very fortunate. The services that I provide are the development of teamwork, the team organization. Those are kind of things that so many communities are lacking. So I've been asked to come and help out in a lot of communities to just sort of get programs off the ground, to get things improved," Broomfield said. "But I'm getting older. I'm 50 years old now. I can't keep doing that. I've got to settle down. So, as I told Ken when we were talking about the job, I want to retire from Kimball when I've finally finished practicing. I want to say Kimball is the last place I ever worked. I've had my eye on Kimball ever since I came over there and worked. I truly look at it as divine intervention that Ken called when he did."