Physician recruitment effort showing results

Clovis hospital attracts seven new doctors during 15-month period.

Plains Regional Medical Center officials are taking steps to meet the area’s physician shortage by actively recruiting doctors from all over the nation, hospital Administrator Brian Bentley said Thursday.

In an on-going recruitment process, the hospital has brought seven new doctors to Clovis in the last 15 months and has recruited a Lubbock-based group of radiation oncologists to provide service at Plains Regional’s new cancer center, he said.

Bentley said late last year that the shortage of doctors in Plains Regional’s service area — which includes Clovis, but also Portales, Fort Sumner, Melrose, as well as the Texas towns of Farwell, Hereford and Muleshoe — was at a crisis level and between 40 and 50 extra doctors were needed.

But, in line with its aim of expanding its role in the region, PRMC officials are determined to help remedy the shortage, he added.

“We can’t become a referral center unless we have the specialties of doctors you refer to,” he said.

“When the time comes, if we have met the needs of Clovis, we may need to start looking at meeting the needs of other communities in our service area,” he added.

The doctors PRMC officials have recruited to Clovis in the last year include: Bob Timmons, an internist; Cynthia Smith, a urologist; Ramesh Paladugu, a general and vascular surgeon; Mythili Paladugu, an anesthesiologist; Michele Hannagan, a doctor of family medicine; Mahamadu Fuseini, a cardiologist; and Arnel Bobadilla, a pulmonologist, intensive-care physician and a “hospitalist,” a doctor who works solely in the hospital.

Bobadilla earned his medical degree in Manilla, Philippines, then went through a residency in internal medicine at Akron (Ohio) General Hospital and a fellowship in pulmonary and intensive care medicine at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

He said he’s put in some long hours since coming to Clovis in January 2003.

“Clovis is a nice place, but I haven’t had the time to really explore it. Other people tell me it’s a nice place to raise children,” he said.

Michele Hannagan, who began work at Presbyterian Health System’s Clovis Family Health Care Center in February, got her medical degree at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey — School of Osteopathic Medicine, and completed her residency in family medicine at Mercy General Hospital in Muskegon, Mich.

But Hannagan, who worked at Triad Hospital, Inc.’s family practice center in Carlsbad before coming to Clovis, said she has always wanted to settle in the Southwest.

“I like Clovis. There’s shopping and nice restaurants here, but the people are still nice, down-home, straightforward Southwestern people. Moving here was all pluses,” she said.

Hannigan said she, too, has been hard at work since moving here.

“There are never any set hours for a physician. It’s sometimes more and sometimes less,” she said.