88 Business View - January 2016
and offer another hundred nursing beds is difficult be-
cause we have to find bed licenses that maybe some
small communities are selling because they’re not
able to keep their occupancy high; maybe there’s two
here, five there, and maybe ten somewhere else, but
it’s tough to acquire a large quantity,” he laments. An-
other factor is the reduced number of available skilled
workers in North Dakota, a state which has one of the
lowest unemployment rates in the nation. “We’ve only
got about an eight percent growth in the 18-64 popu-
lation – the working population, so it’s a challenge to
find and keep staff,” Thompson adds.
In order to cope with growing needs coupled with di-
minishing resources – about half of the Center’s resi-
dents are Medicaid patients and the government is
constantly telling it to try and “do more with less’” –
Thompson would like to see Missouri Slope become a
center of learning and innovation where “the smartest
people in the room” can help determine ways to bring
costs down and provide services more efficiently. “One
of the things that we’re seeing is that the ‘silver tsuna-
mi’ is entering the healthcare industry at exponential
rates and putting more demand on it,” he says. “We’re
seeing that here in Bismarck and there’s really no so-
lution as to how we’re going to slow this down and slow
down the bleeding of all the expenses that’s going to
be put on the system.”
Thompson’s plan to counter this dynamic is to partner
with other institutions such as local colleges, medical
schools, and nursing schools in order to achieve more
engagement at all levels and get those students into the
Center on a daily basis. “They would have access to this
population to do studies, to research, to hypothesize, to
theorize, and to look at what’s going on in the nursing
homes and how care’s being provided to see if there are
different things that we could be doing to help bring the
costs down or be more efficient,” he says. Thompson
also likes to empower his staff to come up with ways in
which services can be provided more effectively as they
go about their day-to-day tasks.
HEALTHCARE
