Bakersfield Life

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It wasn’t long ago when many Bakersfield residents sped to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara or the Bay area for medical treatments in the belief that the local medical community couldn’t handle the problem. Times have most definitely changed.

   “That was when the community had a small number of primary care services and a limited number of specialty services. That era has slowly started disappearing,” says Dr. Ravi Patel, Comprehensive Blood and Cancer Center’s medical director and a clinical professor at UCLA. “There are a host of sophisticated modalities which patients can access once you give them an understanding that you can get sophisticated care here. A lot of things done outside of Kern County are now being done right here.”
   Along with the population explosion in Kern County, local hospitals and medical facilities have upped the game over the last decade with high-tech equipment, increased specialty staffing, cutting-edge procedures and state-of-the-art services that now offer just about any kind of medical care a resident might need.
   “I think in most cases, it’s from a lack of education about what our physicians and surgeons have the capability to do,” says Ken Keller, vice president of physician and business development at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital. “It’s the attractiveness of an academic center, a name...but most of our physicians and surgeons trained at places like UCLA.”
     Here’s a look at just some of the medical care now available locally or coming soon.

San Joaquin Community Hospital
     San Joaquin Community Hospital Associate Vice President Jarrod McNaughton says the hospital’s new 64-slice CT (computerized tomography) scanner has carved the standard chest scan time from 30 minutes down to about 20 seconds, making it particularly useful for diagnoses of traumas and strokes.
     The scanner also does a CT angiography, enabling physicians to get a noninvasive, 3-dimensional picture of arteries of the heart without poking a probe into the patient for several hours to find clogging and detect heart disease.
The scanner is particularly helpful in making a diagnosis on heavier patients, an increasing problem says Dr. Raymond Zurcher, medical director for the emergency department of SJCH.
     “We can get much better definition and do studies more rapidly on heavier patients that previously could not be done,” he says.
     In January 2008, SJCH opened The Stroke Center, a totally coordinated stroke program with a team of dedicated neurologists, nurses and radiology lab technicians – all on call specifically for stroke cases.
     “That’s important with a stroke because the faster people can get the right medications, the more likely they are to have better outcomes,” McNaughton says.
SJCH is also scheduled to begin building its new burn unit later this year with a 6-bed inpatient ICU and a 2-bed outpatient treatment center. There is currently no burn facility in Kern County geared to handle serious burns and victims are typically flown out of the area for treatment. The burn center will be affiliated with a burn center in Los Angeles and physicians will be trained there.
     “These are tremendous steps for the community, especially the burn center,” says Zurcher. “There has been a great need.”

Bakersfield Memorial Hospital
     Set to improve a new vascular service soon, Keller says BMH’s vascular surgeons are able to insert catheters through small incisions in the patient’s legs to make repairs on aortic aneurisms, malformations of arteries and veins, treatment of peripheral vascular and peripheral artery disease and other conditions. Previously, surgeons would have to cut the patient open from belly to sternum to perform these repairs and what used to be a three or four day stay in the hospital is now sometimes just overnight.
     “Our lead vascular surgeon took six months off, went back and took a mini-fellowship at Stanford...and then had a new vascular surgeon join him and the two can do a tremendous amount of things that were not done and were not available here before,” Keller says.
     BMH also has a hyperbaric and wound-care clinic dedicated to treating and curing long-term wounds. Diabetic patients benefit in particular from this service as do patients experiencing bone infections, the bends, tissue loss, burn poisonings, bed sores or very deep wounds.
     The hyperbaric treatment involves forcing pure oxygen into the wound while the patient is encased in a chamber, speeding up the healing process.
It can also be used for aiding in healing after plastic or reconstructive surgeries says Dr. Vipul Dev, a plastics and reconstruction surgeon who is medical director for BMH’s wound care facility. He says 40-60 percent of his practice involves reconstructive surgeries.
     Dev says he is exceedingly proud that he’s part of offering something that was previously unavailable here.
     “I think it is perhaps particularly rewarding to see that this is what I’m working so hard for...to leave a legacy to this town,” Dev says.
     One of the biggest missing pieces of the Bakersfield medical foundation is about to be put in place. A comprehensive pediatrics program with 24 general beds and 8 pediatric ICU beds is set to launch at BMH next year. Children with complicated medical conditions currently must go to Fresno or another children’s hospital out of the area.

Bakersfield Heart Hospital
     Opening in 1999, Bakersfield Heart Hospital is focused on all things to do with heart health, although the facility does handle other types of medical cases. Over the last several years, the Heart Hospital has incorporated several new procedures to aid those in cardiac difficulty.
     According to Roger Sadberry, marketing and physician relations coordinator, patients with atrial fibrillation can now be treated with a new ablation procedure which utilizes a special device put into the patient via a catheter that maps the heart. This provides a 3-dimensional view that enables physicians to isolate the problem area and restore normal rhythm to the heart.
     “This has been around but hasn’t been popular in Bakersfield until the last year,” he says. “The growth here is phenomenal.”
     Bakersfield patients with heart trouble can now also receive a biventricular pacemaker that is for patients in congestive heart failure. This new type of pacemaker stimulates both sides of the heart, giving it a squeeze. Sadberry said Heart Hospital doctors have been using this device for about one year.
     “Our physicians have been very proactive in implanting these devices,” he says. The device is highly effective at eliminating congestive heart failure.
     Heart Hospital doctors are also now implanting automatic defibrillators. This shocks the heart from the inside, converting it back to a regular rhythm. It is inserted similar to the way a pacemaker is implanted.

Comprehensive Blood and Cancer Center
     Bakersfield residents faced with a cancer diagnosis used to flock to Los Angeles medical facilities for treatment, especially if they wanted to be part of a clinical trial that could yield a new cure. But the CBCC’s state-of-the-art medical care makes that unnecessary. Patel says chemotherapy, radiation and imaging, as well as an association with UCLA’s clinical trial program offer everything cancer patients need.
     “We have all the modalities in one single location,” says Patel. “Now they don’t have to go to UCLA. We were the first site UCLA established in the research network.”
     Since about 2003, CBCC has offered stereotactic radiosurgery that precisely targets very deep seated tumors in the brain and can even be done as outpatient surgery. Previously, this type of precision surgery was not available in Bakersfield and now the center does about 15 per year.
     A very sophisticated CT/PET scanner is also utilized now at CBCC which can detect cancer much more effectively, but also takes images and merges it with radiation therapy equipment to more precisely deliver treatment to a tumor.
     “This can be used with most types of cancers – lungs, brain, pancreatic cancers,” says Patel. “It’s a very accurate overlay that allows us to very definitively treat a particular area by not treating a normal tissue and targeting a cancerous area.”

Mercy Hospitals of Bakersfield
     A brand new procedure just rolled out in the past month at Mercy to treat stroke victims. Thrombectomy, a process of threading a type of snare attached to a wire into the head and pulling out a blood clot, will be highly beneficial to stroke victims says Arthur Fontaine, M.D., director of radiology at Mercy Truxtun and Mercy Southwest hospitals.
     The procedure was being done at UCLA but Mercy just did its first thrombectomy this spring and had a successful outcome. Previously, a medicine would have been injected into the brain to dissolve the clot but the victim only had six hours after the stroke in order for that procedure to work. The thrombectomy offers much more time.
      “With the new device you have up to 24 hours,” says Fontaine. “It gives us more options. Sometimes people don’t realize they’ve had a stroke. It may have occurred at night in their sleep.”
     Mercy has also begun to treat cancer patients with an RF ablator, which is a method of “cooking” a tumor inside a body without opening up the body cavity. A small incision is made and a needle, guided with the help of a CT scanner, is inserted into a tumor. The needle is then heated, causing the tumor to virtually cook and burn.
     “This happens with a millimeter needle hole in the patient versus a foot-long scar,” says Fontaine.
     Mercy is also conducting interventional radiology as part of an effort to do minimally invasive surgeries. One such procedure is vertebroplasty, used on compression fractures. A glue is put into the patient’s injury which helps rid them of pain and helps them move again, especially useful in elderly patients with compression fractures from osteoporosis.
     “It helps mobilize them and get them going,” Fontaine says.
Medical experts mentioned organ or bone marrow transplants as one area that Bakersfield does not have the medical ability to perform. Many agree there are still other needs, but overall, medical care in Bakersfield is top notch, making a trip to Los Angeles mostly unnecessary.