A new emergency-care hospital is set to open in Smith County early this year. It will house the rural county’s first emergency room in two decades. 

Smith County Emergency Hospital in Raleigh will provide 24-hour emergency services, observation care and outpatient radiology and lab work services. Raleigh is currently a 35-minute drive from the nearest emergency room. 

The hospital will operate as a division of Covington County Hospital. The Collins hospital is a part of South Central Regional Medical Center’s partnership with rural community hospitals Simpson General Hospital in Mendenhall and Magee General Hospital, all helmed by CEO Greg Gibbes.

The hospital’s opening reflects Covington County Hospital’s “deeply held mission of helping others, serving patients and trying to do it in a way that would create sustainability,” not just for its own county, but also for surrounding communities, said Gibbes at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday. 

Renovations of the building – which previously housed Patients’ Choice Medical Center of Smith County, an acute-care facility that closed in 2023 – are complete. The facility now awaits the Mississippi Department of Health’s final inspection, which could come as soon as next week, according to Gibbes. 

The hospital hopes to then be approved as a “rural emergency hospital” by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

A rural emergency hospital status allows hospitals to receive $3.3 million from the federal government each year in exchange for closing their inpatient units and transferring patients requiring stays over 24 hours to a nearby facility. 

The program was created to serve as a lifeline for struggling rural hospitals at risk of closing. Six hospitals have closed in Mississippi since 2005, and 33% are at immediate risk of closure, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.

Receiving a rural emergency hospital designation will make the hospital more financially sustainable, said Gibbes. He said he has “no concerns” about the hospital being awarded the federal designation. 

Mississippi has more rural emergency hospitals than any other state besides Arkansas, which also operates five. Nationwide, 34 hospitals have received the designation, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services enrollment data. Over half of them are located in the Southeast. 

The hospital will have a “significant economic impact” of tens of millions of dollars and has already created about 60 jobs in Smith County, Gibbes said.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

State employees would get eight weeks of paid maternity leave under a bill that passed the House unanimously Thursday. It now advances to the Senate. 

Currently, government employees in Mississippi must forgo pay if they decide to take time off after the birth or adoption of a child. 

House Bill 1063, authored by Rep. Kevin Felsher, R-Biloxi, would also give two weeks of paid leave to the child’s father or secondary caregiver. The law would apply to birth, as well as adoption. It would not apply to public school teachers. 

“What we’re hoping to do is raise the bar and say ‘Look what we’re doing, everybody else get on board,” Felsher said. “… If you’re looking for benefits behind it, besides being healthy for the family and good for the mom and dad, it sounds like it could be a good recruitment and retention tool for state employees at a time where they’re hard to keep. The state doesn’t pay as much (as the private sector).”

Speaker of the House Jason White also said the legislation is part of the state’s commitment to supporting families in the wake of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. 

“As a pro-life state, Mississippi is in a critical position to meet the needs for healthier outcomes for parents and children and to support families in our state’s workplace,” White said in a statement. “With our fellow southern states offering some form of parental leave, and Mississippi currently offering no paid parental leave to their state employees, we too can reflect our commitment to the well-being of families, as well as utilize this benefit as an employee recruitment and retention tool.”

White also said the legislation sets a good example for the private sector to follow suit.

The policy has garnered broad support this year, across party lines and chambers – with a similar bill introduced by Sen. Jeremy England, R-Ocean Springs.

State leaders such as Attorney General Lynn Fitch have also publicly endorsed the policy. 

“Mississippi is one of only twelve states that does not provide paid parental leave for state employees, and I am encouraged to see the Legislature taking steps to enact it this year,” Fitch told Mississippi Today. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A Senate bill seeking to ban diversity, equity and inclusion offices on Mississippi college campuses would also create a taskforce to study how the state’s higher education system can become more efficient, a discussion some have feared is the opening salvo in an effort to closeor merge universities. 

In addition to banning DEI initiatives, Senate Bill 2515, also known as the “Requiring Efficiency For Our Colleges And Universities System” (REFOCUS) Act, would seek to answer questions like, why does Mississippi have a lower rate of postsecondary degrees than other states and what can be done about it when fewer high school graduates will go to college in the coming years? 

Last year’s version of this bill, which was introduced at the same time as other legislation to close universities, sparked concerns that lawmakers were dipping their toes into closing some of the state’s eight public universities. An online petition garnered more than 15,000 signatures opposing the bill.

But the bill’s primary sponsor, Sen. Nicole Boyd, R-Oxford, told Mississippi Today that’s not her goal. The chair of the Senate Colleges and Universities committee said she wants to use the taskforce to dig into a range of questions, from if Mississippi’s higher education funding formula is equitable to why some universities in the state have better graduation rates than others. 

“I think we have to in Mississippi be efficient with the dollars that we have, and this is what this taskforce is looking at,” Boyd said. “The goal of the taskforce is not to close any colleges but is simply to look and see what are the plans that they have to increase their enrollment?”

By “efficiency,” Boyd said she’s referring to whether state dollars invested in Mississippi’s colleges and universities “are producing the best results.” The taskforce would deliver its findings by the end of the year and be led by lawmakers, members of the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees, and representatives from Mississippi’s research universities, regional colleges and historically Black universities. 

“We need to know what the clear path is ahead and what is the direction we are moving in,” Boyd added. 

Nonetheless, discussions about closing universities are in the ether in Mississippi. Last year, Sen. John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, introduced a bill to close three public universities in an effort, he said, to start a conversation. The bill recalled a plan proposed years ago by Gov. Haley Barbour  to merge Mississippi University for Women into Mississippi State University and merge the state’s three HBCUs into one.

“Sometimes you just have to pull the Band-Aid off the wound,” Polk said last year. “Until I introduced this bill, no one was talking about that.”

Boyd did not pass Polk’s bill out of committee. This year, Boyd said she has talked with leaders of the state’s universities, and they are excited to have conversations about how to graduate more Mississippians and keep them working in the state. 

The taskforce will eventually look at the state’s community college system, Boyd said. The meetings will be livestreamed and potentially held in college towns throughout the state, an idea Boyd said came at the suggestion of a university she would not name. 

“This all is about making them more efficient and then creating a stronger workforce for the state,” she said. “How do we do this because we know we’re going to have, if population trends are what they predict, we know we’re going to have fewer students from the state of Mississippi.” 

Boyd tied the taskforce to anti-DEI legislation because, she said, there is a “correlation” between efforts to ban DEI and increase efficiency.

“DEI programs have not proven to be in many situations particularly efficient at really helping people,” she said. “DEI programs in many cases have not been the most productive use of dollars.” 

Instead, the taskforce should be looking at how the universities can more efficiently help people on their own merit, she added, whether that’s understanding how best to serve different student populations or how to attract nontraditional students like single mothers. 

“We have a tremendous number of people that start college that don’t finish it and then we have a lot of people with student debt,” Boyd said. “Why is that? What happened that they could not graduate? That’s where the emphasis is.” 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.