Rural health group to add top job

Partnership founder to be new president; CEO named

Rex Jones and Mellie Bridewell
Rex Jones and Mellie Bridewell

The Arkansas Rural Health Partnership will have a new chief executive May 1, while the outgoing CEO will take on a new leadership role, the nonprofit announced Friday.

Mellie Bridewell, who founded the partnership in 2008, will serve as president, a newly created position that outranks the CEO and will "focus on strategic growth initiatives for the organization," the news release states.

Bridewell is also the regional director in the Office of Strategy Management at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, a member of the partnership.

Rex Jones, who was CEO of Magnolia Regional Medical Center for more than five years, will take over as partnership CEO. He will work closely with the UAMS strategy team to further the goal of "improving health care access and delivery in rural Arkansas," the news release stated.

Jones has been a member of the partnership's board of directors for eight years, including one year as president, and has been a rural hospital administrator for 25 years in three states, according to the release.

"I appreciate UAMS and their forward vision to include people with rural hospital experience in the development of their strategy to assist rural hospitals and enable them to care for patients in their communities," Jones said in the release.

Bridewell will continue to "be that strategic visionary" for the partnership while Jones will oversee the business aspect of the nonprofit, said Lynn Hawkins, the partnership's chief officer of membership and university partnerships.

In a Friday interview, Brian Miller, vice chairman of the board of directors, called Bridewell "a guru with grants."

The grants Bridewell has secured for the partnership allowed the DeWitt Hospital and Nursing Home, of which Miller was the CEO, to purchase equipment that helped the facility manage the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, Miller said.

On Jan. 25 and 26, the partnership's resources went to the DeWitt Hospital's rescue during "the most stressful day" Miller has seen in his career of more than three decades, he said.

The hospital has two ventilators but does not have an intensive care unit, so it makes sure to "stabilize and ship out" patients in need of critical care, Miller said. A heart attack patient and a covid-positive patient arrived at the hospital in short succession, occupying both ventilators, and there were no intensive care unit beds available in Arkansas or neighboring states, he said.

"We needed to shake the bushes and find a bed, so my first call was to Mellie Bridewell, and she immediately started making calls on our behalf," Miller said.

The DeWitt Hospital received three more patients who needed critical care within hours, and the Arkansas Rural Health Partnership located available beds and sent helicopters to transfer some of the patients, Miller said.

"If we hadn't had the Rural Health Partnership, it might have ended differently," he said. "This ended with all five patients leaving our hospital alive in a day and a half."

Bridewell was not available for an interview Friday, but she said in a statement that the pandemic made the partnership "invaluable" to rural Arkansas health facilities "by providing communication between hospitals, sharing of resources, supplies, and equipment, education to healthcare providers that did not know how to take care of critical patients, and, most of all, support and access to each other and resources throughout the state."

The news release stated that the partnership has gained new members, programs and financial support in the past few years, even with the pandemic happening simultaneously.

The president is not the first new leadership position the partnership created recently. The organization hired Frazier Edwards as vice president of strategic partnerships and business development in the fall, and the president's role is "the second phase of key personnel support," the news release stated.

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