Hospitals' name change is 'a natural evolution'

Medical centers in Fort Smith and Hot Springs now to be called 'Mercy Hospital'

Published: April 7, 2012

By Marilyn Lanford
Rogers Correspondent

Workers install the new Mercy Hospital sign in Springfield, Mo., in January as part of Mercy Health System's name conversion plan. Catholic hospitals in Fort Smith and Hot Springs will change their names April 30.

ROGERS -- On April 30, final name changes will occur for two Catholic hospitals -- St. Edward Mercy Medical Center in Fort Smith and St. Joseph Mercy Medical Center in Hot Springs. According to Mercy Health System, the new names will be Mercy Hospital Fort Smith and Mercy Hospital Hot Springs, respectively.

According to the announcement earlier this year, Mercy Health System's decision to move its facilities in 100 communities to one name -- Mercy -- was an overall effort "to create a more meaningful and unified identity."

Jared Bryson, vice president of mission for St. Edward Mercy Medical Center, said, "Each community that we serve went by many different names. But all of us at Mercy are connected by the same heritage, mission, values and vision. To better serve our patients and our communities, we owe it to these communities to be known by a common name: Mercy."

As the nation's eighth largest Catholic health system, Mercy Health System serves a four-state region, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. Each area hospital will simply be known as Mercy Hospital and the city where they are located. Mercy clinic locations across the state will change to one name as well. It will include 31 hospitals and more than 200 outpatient facilities.

"This renaming process started last September when our hospital in St. Louis -- formerly St. John's Mercy Medical Center & Children's Hospital -- became Mercy Hospital St. Louis and Mercy Children's Hospital," Bryson said.

"These were followed earlier this year by St. John's in Springfield, Mo., and Joplin, Mo. Now the Arkansas communities will 'go-live' with the new naming on April 30, 2012. Our communities in Kansas will transition in March 2012 and our final community of Oklahoma and Laredo will transition in May 2012."

In the earlier announcement, Mercy president and CEO, Lynn Britton said, "We owe it to the three million patients we serve each year to know us by one name. Adopting the Mercy name is not so much a change as a natural evolution. Our electronic health record has allowed our physicians and medical teams to coordinate care across facilities, communities, and even states that were never before possible. It has opened up a whole new world of more convenient and personalized care for our patients."

"We think the common name Mercy will help us connect with our co-workers and facilities across four states and will better serve our patients," said Jeffrey Slatton, media relations specialist at St. Joseph Mercy Health Center. "Mercy is one of the 6 percent of hospitals nationwide with a fully integrated electronic health record that follows patients throughout our system. It is instantly available whether they go to the family practice physician, the cardiologist or the emergency department. With the MyMercy application, patients have access to their personal health records via computer and smart phones."

Slatton said, "The hospital was founded as St. Joseph's Infirmary in 1888 and there will still be folks calling us St. Joe's for years to come. But we hope that people will recognize our larger mission as Mercy and the way the name pays tribute to the Sisters of Mercy."

The Sisters of Mercy also have a long history in Fort Smith. The first four sisters came by steamboat up the Arkansas River from Little Rock in 1853. They immediately took on the task of educating the poor and caring for the sick. It was during the Civil War that the sisters created a makeshift hospital, taking in both Confederate and Union soldiers as patients. Out of this rich heritage, the Sisters of Mercy opened St. Edward's Infirmary in 1905, named after Bishop Edward Fitzgerald, second bishop of Little Rock.

Bryson said the name change has created a renewed sense of "preserving our heritage and making it more visible and real in our communities. This conversion is an awakening of a community ready to steward the ministry as the Sisters of Mercy before us did so faithfully."

Each community will be celebrating the transition in two ways according to Bryson. One is a public prayer service and unveiling of the new name and logo. The second is in finding ways to honor and memorialize the history and heritage of each community.

"In Fort Smith, co-workers and leaders are doing a three to four-hour heritage formation session in which they get to meet the founding sisters of the Fort Smith ministries in story form," Bryson said.

They will visit the site of the old St. Edward Mercy Hospital and be led through a conversation with a nurse who worked in the hospital with various sisters.