Members of the Greene County board of supervisors in informal discussion during their June 23 meeting expressed support for the decision last week by the Greene County Medical Center board of trustees to terminate the lease of McFarland Clinic for space in the medical center.
“I’m sympathetic to a small degree with McFarland Clinic, but for years McFarland has refused to send referrals to the medical center, has refused to support it,” supervisor Guy Richardson said. “In the long run, we’ll be better off. It was a business decision, the right decision. It was a decision based on survival.”
“I think McFarland had it in their power to not have it go this way if they had done things differently, but they just refused to,” he said.
Supervisors John Muir and Tom Contner agreed with Richardson.
The medical center trustees in May entered into an agreement to bring a UnityPoint Clinic with family practitioners to Jefferson. Medical Center CEO Carl Behne said UnityPoint Clinic has begun recruiting doctors and may have doctors practicing in office space at the medical center before the end of the year. McFarland Clinic’s lease on the west portion of the building will expire June 19, 2015.
McFarland Clinic Jefferson is currently staffed by five doctors, Katherine Cates Panakos DO, Robert Clemons MD, James Gerdes DO, Steve Karber MD, and Constantine Panakos, and Jennifer Sills ARNP. Drs Cates Panakos and Panakos had previously announced their intention to leave the practice in July and Dr Karber plans to retire in the foreseeable future.
