Pocahontas Community Hospital officials believe in investing in the local community.
From the hospital’s origins as a community-driven effort to build and create a hospital to the current board’s successful improvements around the facility, the hospital has a track record of putting money and resources where they are most needed.
“Investing in the future doesn’t work unless everyone does,” PCH CEO James Roetman said. “It’s important for everyone to invest in the future.”
He’s at the point in his career that he’s asking the big, existential, legacy questions.
“What are we going to leave the next generation of people,” Roetman asked. “That’s a question we all need to answer.”
For PCH, the answer has been millions of dollars in investment in its building, increasing space and services. Next is the $20 million construction of a rehab building on the hospital’s north side, as well as renovation of the existing facilities. The 6,000-square foot addition will create more space for all kinds of therapies, from physical to occupational to speech, as well as cardiac, pulmonary and respiratory therapies.
The hospital already offers these services.
“It’s a department that will continue to grow much larger,” Roetman said, adding that the need for the therapies has increased significantly in the past five years.
The renovation work will focus on the emergency room and the nursing area, he said.
“This will be the largest financial project the hospital has done,” Roetman said.
PCH was built nearly 60 years ago for about $600,000, which about $6.1 million in 2026 dollars.
Roetman is a believer in leading by example, which is why PCH has been so active in promoting the proposed $20 million bond for Pocahontas Area Community School. Community members have asked him why he has led the hospital staff and board members to express their support for the bond.
“It’s important, because our board and our staff have to understand what makes us successful,” Roetman said. “Not having a school district that can retain businesses and families hurts the hospital.”
First, a little more than half of PCH’s staff graduated from local high schools, Roetman said. The hospital needs strong schools here to graduate students who can go on to study the subjects that will bring them back as hospital employees in a variety of fields.
“We count on our school districts to feed our hospital,” Roetman said.
For the first time in several years, PCH has zero job openings. Roetman said PCH was one of just a handful of Iowa hospitals that could say that. PCH’s staff turnover rate is about half as much as the statewide average. PCH loses 4 to 5 percent of employees in a year, while hospitals statewide turnover 15 to 18 percent of their employees.
“Part of that is our ability to recruit people from our local schools to come work with us,” Roetman said. “Why do we support the school? Because we know it means a great deal to this facility.”
Second, communities that retain good schools are communities that can continue to grow. People are hesitant to choose a community without a school, and that can mean fewer employees willing to move here for specialized health care jobs and fewer people staying in Pocahontas County to raise their families, which means a smaller patient pool.
“If we continue to lose the population at the rate we’ve been losing it, this hospital is not going to survive,” he said. “We need the school, the counties, the cities to invest in the future. If we don’t, it’s not going to matter.”
It’s all tied together, Roetman said.
“If you think Pocahontas is struggling now, do you want to see what happens if we lose a school district and hospital?” Roetman said. “Then you’ll see what a real struggle is.”
Communities have to keep paying to keep the assets — and the jobs —that they already have.
PCH has been keeping up with the need for improvement. The last three projects at the hospital have been for more than $7 million. Some of the recent bigger investments included purchasing new ambulances and building a new ambulance bay, renovation of the UnityPoint clinic part of the building, purchase of a nearby building to create more room for parking and an improved helipad.
People visit the hospital and tell Roetman how much they love it, how much they appreciate the investments the hospital board has made.
That kind of investment “shouldn’t just stop with our hospital,” he added.
The proposed bond would increase the school’s property levy, yes, but PAC would still be in the lowest third of property tax levies of all schools in the Prairie Lakes AEA region. Roetman asked if PAC voters have attended sporting events at Newell-Fonda or Graettinger-Terrill, which have higher levies than PAC. The facilities there look the way they do because of the amount taxpayers are contributing to their school district’s finances.
He also pointed out that PAC is coming up with about a third of the funds needed for the proposed projects from sources that aren’t the tax levy. That’s unusual and shows the district is putting “skin in the game” for the projects, he added.
“People have to understand, there is some self-investment required,” Roetman said.
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