Merrily Mount has cared for international patients, but she’s never received international visitors at the South County Medical Clinic in Quilcene – until now.

A delegation from the Ishikawa Prefectural Nursing University of Japan is expected to visit her in Quilcene March 24 to see how she’s managed to serve the community as a nurse practitioner for the past 21 years. Mount and the visitors then take a trip north to Port Townsend to check out Jefferson Healthcare hospital, which Mount credits with making her practice possible through its support.

“The Japanese delegation wanted to see a solo practitioner, of which not many are left in Washington state,” Mount said. “Most are in other practices’ offices.”

Japan is not only facing a significant shortage of medical care providers, with a ratio of roughly 130 providers to every 100,000 patients, but rural areas are especially underserved, according to Mount.

“They’re interested in using our clinic as a model for their program,” Mount said. “They’re serving coastlines with multiple little islands. They want to know how we’ve kept going when other rural practitioners had had to close up shop.”

PIONEERING WAVE

Mount was among the pioneering wave of nurse practitioners. Her graduating class at Syracuse University numbered only 12 students in 1975. And while she trained in larger hospitals, she was taught to rely on herself as much as possible.

“I’ve always viewed this as my private practice, rather than just an extension of the county’s public health system,” said Mount, who estimates that she sees an average of 15 patients a day. “At the same time, I wouldn’t have been a success without our connections to Jefferson Healthcare. Through two administrations, their devotion and dedication to maintaining a continuity of access to quality care has helped keep our doors open, our lights on and our bills paid.”

Mount described herself as utterly devoid of any “business savvy,” so she sees Jefferson Healthcare’s administrative assistance as invaluable. Which is not to say she hasn’t had to stretch a dollar. When she first opened the clinic in Quilcene 21 years ago, she was given $10,000, of which $8,000 went to an EKG machine, and the remaining $2,000 was all she had to buy the rest of what she needed.

“Twenty-one years ago, it was all about inpatient care,” Mount said. “The move to outpatient care like ours was a huge paradigm shift. When the hospital was being pitched for Port Townsend, our chamber of commerce agreed to vote for the levy to fund its construction, but only if it gave us a clinic in turn.”

That deal proved vital for Quilcene in the long run, as the area’s population has boomed since then, after a brief downturn on the heels of the logging industry’s decline.

HOME IN QUILCENE

“It’s been wonderful to see so many young people come back to the town where they grew up,” Mount said. “They remember the quality of life they had and want to pass that down to their own children.”

Mount has also greeted a number of former residents of California and Portland, Oregon.

“They’ve discovered the area’s organic farming and seafood,” Mount said. “Quilcene and Brinnon are very independent communities. We can survive on our own.”

The internet and visiting specialists have helped Quilcene residents do more than merely survive. The clinic hosts regular visits from experts in mental health, heart disease and diabetes, and Mount can go online to check up on her regular patients’ care at other care facilities.

“If one of my patients is in the ER at Jefferson Healthcare, I can look up which doctor is looking after them, and how long they’re expected to stay,” Mount said. “Before, I wouldn’t have found out until I got a fax, a phone call or a snail mail. When I started here, there were only two fax machines between our clinic and the hospital.”

OTHER MEETINGS

As the Japanese delegation learns the history and practices of Mount’s clinic, its members are also to be greeted by Quilcene School Principal Gary Stebbins and Port Townsend Mayor Deborah Stinson.

“We’ll have some gifts for them, including local oysters whose species originated in Japan, handed out by a few of the students,” Mount said. “We wanted our schoolkids to have that sense of pride, that these visitors came all the way from Japan to see how we do things.”

When the delegation visits Jefferson Healthcare, Mount noted, the purpose likewise will be “to show them the hospital that made all of this possible,” as well as to introduce the visitors to the information technology staff at the hospital, whose members are to go over the finer points of internet medical security.

“What matters is that they’re coming to us because we did it right,” Mount said. “Our foundation was correct. The community and the hospital have worked together to develop a model that has benefited the Olympic Peninsula, and now could benefit many more people than that. We have a lot to offer.”