Dirks

Ensuring that Marshalltonians and central Iowans have health care choices and providers locally is a major priority for Becky Dirks, development director at UnityPoint Health-Marshalltown (UPH-M).

Dirks’ task is daunting but achievable. There is competition locally from McFarland Clinic, which recently built a new facility on East Merle Hibbs Boulevard. Primary Health Care on Iowa Avenue West offers family practice options and pediatrics.

The Veterans Administration (VA) also offers health care services from offices on Iowa Avenue West. There is competition from Mary Greeley hospital in Ames, as well as other health care providers in Des Moines.

Dirks, 47, has been on the job one month working out of her office at UPH-M’s hospital and offices at 55 UnityPoint Way. Other important tasks during her brief tenure have been to meet and thank area donors and getting to know the nine-member UPH-M Foundation board of directors.

She is also meeting with community leaders and publicizing UPH-M’s value as a key health care provider.

“Becky has hit the ground running,” said Doug Joslin, who chairs the UPH-M Foundation Board of Directors. “I am impressed with her organizational skills. I have asked Becky to do several things – thank our donors, be visible in the community, to be positive about UPH-M and take questions. There is an undercurrent of concern from some local and area residents about the hospital leaving downtown and we want to address those issues.”

UPH-M’s history dates to 1914 – when it opened as Evangelical Deaconess Hospital and served its first patient in a building at the intersection of South Third Avenue and East Main Street.

Over the decades, there was a merger and several name changes to reflect the ever-changing dynamic and keen competition in health care. UPH-M also expanded its services and opened satellite clinics in Conrad, State Center and Toledo.

Foundation member Bobbi Brandenburg of Albion, who retired 12 years ago after serving 47 years as a nurse, is now nearing the end of her second three-year term and said she liked that Dirks has been meeting with individual board members to measure their interests and listen to their concerns.

“Becky is sound in her foundation of knowing what needs to be done while getting to know the community better,” Brandenburg said. “I have stressed the importance of UPH-M maintaining its service levels at the local clinics.”

Brandenburg said the UPH-M Foundation has an excellent record of raising breast cancer awareness, among other issues, and money to buy needed equipment, such as new ambulances.

And she wants those efforts to continue. Dirks said another key priority is to make sure a donor wall — recognizing area donors — is installed in the new facility. An area has been selected in the hospital, and Dirks will be meeting with a sign company next week.

“If donors who invested in the new hospital were promised recognition on a donor wall, or for a room or equipment or other, then we have to follow through,” she said during a recent interview.

Specifically, the donors and numerous support groups and volunteers also made it possible for UPH-M to be a major health care provider for 110 years and to move all its operations from downtown to Marshalltown’s south side. Dirks is not new to health care, or to the all-important world of soliciting donations for clinics or hospitals.

And she is used to stressing the need for residents to support health care through donations or volunteering. She worked eight years in marketing and public relations at Grundy County Memorial Hospital.

Dirks then took time off from work to help care for her growing family. She and her husband now have three children at home and two in college. Next, she worked for Allen Memorial Hospital in Waterloo, helping raise funds for that facility’s hospice care unit.

Pam Dellagardelle – who worked with Dirks in Grundy Center as the CEO and is now working as an administrator with UnityPoint Health in Des Moines – suggested Dirks apply for the Marshalltown position.

Dirks, a University of Northern Iowa graduate, decided to apply and was hired.

“We will be good stewards of money donated to UPH-M Foundation,” she said. “And we want Marshalltonians and central Iowans to be excited about our efforts here.”