We Are Adventist Health Portland
Story 103

Terry Johnsson: Our mission here at Adventist Health Portland is simply living God's love by inspiring health, wholeness and hope. And what makes our hospital unique is that, in 1893, we were one of the first medical systems in Portland to bring what we call whole-person health, and that simply means we believe that the mind, body and soul is important, and it really takes all three of those to have a complete wholeness of a person.

Kyle King: Adventist Health Portland is a 302-bed hospital. We have 27 multi-specialty clinics, therapy services, imaging services, mental health services. We do home health care and hospice care, as well.

Wes Rippey, MD: This location has proved very advantageous, in that we sit at a confluence of two freeways, so there is ready access to our site. This means that we get considerable ambulance traffic. We have 32 rooms in our ER, and we serve more cardiac arrests that hit our ER than the next two hospitals in Portland combined.

We serve in the neighborhood of 80,000 patients typically in a year, and we see over 500,000 visits in a year in our facilities. The director of the Multnomah County EMS system has said that we are sitting in heart attack alley. As a result, we have an extensive cardiology program, doing open-heart surgery, electrophysiology, interventional cardiology work and general cardiology work.

Terry Johnsson: So when it comes to a patient, one of the things that we do is that we will first introduce ourself to the patient. And then we'll ask them a question. "Is it important to you for your healing if we brought someone here that's part of your faith tradition?" And the person can say no or yes. We truly believe that everyone has the right to believe what they want to believe, but we have the right to love them. And that's what makes our hospital so unique, is that we really celebrate a culture of love.

Wes Rippey, MD: Ultimately care to a patient is a one-to-one process. That's how we work on delivering our mission. But that care's basically just the tip of an iceberg, where we have a very large, deep, and wide structure of support to deliver that one-to-one care.

Kyle King: I love Adventist Health. I love the organizational culture that's really about caring for people and caring for each other. And I think that's a really special culture, and it's the reason I'm here. It's the reason that I love my work, that through people and through teams and together, we can love this community in a whole new way.