With 1,800 employees and more than 200 additional individuals on contract, “Desert Regional Medical Center is one of the largest, most comprehensive hospitals in the region, and an economic engine for the Coachella Valley,” says its CEO, Carolyn Caldwell. “We are the only Level II trauma center. Our neonatal intensive care unit means we are able to bring sick babies in from all over the valley, and the Comprehensive Cancer Center just added four new medical oncologists.”
Caldwell says DRMC has made a significant investment in public health, working with the Desert AIDS Project to spend $1.5 million over three years to ensure that individuals here can be tested for HIV. “When individuals know that they’re positive,” she says, they can get into care more quickly, and “they’re going to have much better outcomes.”
The medical center’s partnership with the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine began a year ago, and a new UCR clinic will begin training the first group of residents in July 2015. Staffed by six faculty members who live in the community and see patients at DRMC, the clinic has expanded physician availability. The center has also recently added “several primary care physicians to serve our community, and all those physicians are getting busy very quickly,” Caldwell says. “We look at our community needs analysis throughout the year to make sure we have the right services and the right physicians so our citizens don’t have to leave the community.”
DRMC also works in close partnership with the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership, relying on the agency’s internship and mentorship programs to introduce young people to healthcare careers at the hospital: “They’re working alongside other professionals, and our hope is that they will come back to the Coachella Valley and want to work in our hospitals.”
Caldwell and her husband recently purchased a home in Palm Springs and she raves about the “opportunity to work in such a magnificent location, to be a part of the UCR Medical School, and Desert Regional Medical Center.”