Health Care

Branson has consistently been rated in surveys and publications as a good area for retirees. Its clean environment, fresh air, and clean water, as well as entertainment options, rate high with families and those looking for a place to settle in for their golden years. These individuals are also interested in health-care facilities and hospitals and their continued growth. In fact, the two large area hospitals, Cox Health Systems and St. John’s Health System, with 7,600 and 6,900 employees, are the top two Springfield-area employers. Such growth will continue, as it is expected the populations of Greene County and Springfield, with the ancillary counties of Webster, Christian, Stone, and Taney, will increase 25 percent by 2010.

Branson has its own nonprofit hospital, Skaggs Community Heath Center, and Branson is only minutes from the large hospital facilities in Springfield. Because Branson is also a tourist area, we have some special health-care issues and problems.

With its 105 beds, Skaggs Community Health Center and its $23 million, five-story outpatient medical facility is a hospital unusual in size and quality for a community with Branson’s deceptively small population. Each year some 25,000 people find themselves in the Skaggs emergency room, a number that is average for a hospital three times the size. The eight million tourists who visit Branson each year bring with them their heart conditions. They are involved in fender benders or worse. They fall and break bones or catch themselves on their own fishing hooks. They get their backs out of whack playing too hard. Children get into poison ivy or end up with scrapes and cuts or broken bones in their pursuit of fun on the family vacation. In fact, about 40 percent of the ER patients in our local hospital are tourists.

Branson’s emergency-room care received good marks in the Missouri Department of Health’s report in the Show Me Buyer’s Guide: Hospital Emergency Services, a statewide survey of 128 hospitals. The Skaggs emergency facilities were praised because among the hospital’s emergency service personnel, 80 percent of the full-time physicians are board certified. All of the registered nurses have completed advanced cardiac life support training. Specialized medical practitioners are on call. The medical director and all of the nursing staff have specialized pediatric training. Because of the large number of retirees in the area who demand high-quality medical services, Branson has a higher than average number of specialized medical practitioners for a town its size.

In October 1999, an Iowa tourist became the first Branson visitor saved by the Branson Fire Department’s new automatic external heart defibrillator. Branson, as a tourism magnet, is a natural location for such equipment because of its high resident population of retirees and because it gets a lot of older visitors. In fact, of 147 people who died of cardiac arrest in Taney County the year before, 48 were tourists. So Branson has become “heart friendly.” The Branson school district bought five defibrillators, one for each building and one for the football facility. And Ozark Mountain Bank offered interest-free loans for the first 100 businesses that bought defibrillators, which cost $1,500 to $3,000 each. The demand for heart health care necessitated the remodeling of a portion of the new hospital so that cardiac surgery can be performed. Heart surgeries are now performed by new cardiac physicians under the guidance of Ralph J. Damiano Jr. MD, chief of cardiac surgery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the John M. Shoenberg Professor of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine.

A growing number of patients and a long waiting list have pushed Ozarks hospitals to add magnetic resonance imaging machines to their facilities. Skaggs Community Health Center, as well as Cox Health Systems and St. John’s Health System, have added MRIs to their facilities. Both St. John’s and Cox have clinics just north of Skaggs Community Health Center, giving Branson its own “medical mile.”

If you are on vacation, Branson is as good an area to get sick or have a medical emergency as any. We don’t encourage you to do so, and we hope our visitors have a safe and healthful vacation. But if you don’t, we have the facilities to take care of you.

We’ve included information about the general state of health care in the Branson area, what to do in case you’re involved in an accident, and a list of emergency numbers. We’ve even provided medical information for your pets.