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McKenzie Robinson | SBJ

2021 Health Care Champions Top Doctor: Dr. Christina Capps

Citizens Memorial Hospital

Posted online

Dr. Christina Capps is a passionate advocate for aging well and dying with dignity. As a triple board-certified physician in internal, geriatric, and hospice and palliative medicine, she oversees the care of 300 residents across four of Citizens Memorial Hospital’s long-term care facilities.

Her patients include those recovering from hospitalizations who are in need of rehabilitation and those who call a facility home. She says it’s her mission to provide the best long-term care in southwest Missouri for patients and is always researching the latest medical evidence to provide that excellent level of geriatric care.

“I round in the long-term care facilities associated with CMH every day. … I generally see each of my residents at least every two or three months and try to get to know them as people, not just nursing home residents,” Capps says. “I am there to help with tough decision making and to coordinate difficult advanced care planning conversations when they are needed. Sometimes that includes helping them to die peacefully, comfortably and with the dignity that they each desire.

“I take pride in caring for my patients as I would hope a physician would care for my own family.”

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically shifted her role as the threat of the disease especially impacted the populations she serves.

“Older adults are among the most vulnerable to this disease, and I have been doing my best to protect them,” she says.

Capps connected with her network of colleagues at academic institutions to develop a protocol to deal with COVID outbreaks and patient care. She says she assisted in direct patient care for four outbreaks and supported fellow physicians through three others. She’s also helped secure monoclonal antibody infusions in the long-term care facilities and has encouraged vaccinations.

She’s also been the caring doctor by a patient’s side when treatments failed.

“I have been the physician rounding on patients who are dying and cannot see their loved ones in person,” she says. “I have provided counsel to families and given them permission to not risk exposure to this disease by coming to see their loved ones by reassuring them that me and my staff will not let their loved one suffer or be alone.

“In times where it feels that I have little control of anything, I try to provide loving, evidenced-based care to my patients and do so with a positive attitude that hopefully encourages my exhausted staff.”

Capps says being entrusted to serve as medical director of four CMH facilities is her proudest professional accomplishment. She took on her first medical directorship just months into the pandemic and added three more facilities to her responsibilities this summer. She came to CMH as a geriatrics and palliative medicine physician in September 2019.

Capps thinks of herself as a voice for older adults in the health care system and in the community.

“I have given talks to the community at large about the aging process and what is normal and what is not. I have tried to prevent COVID-19 from affecting any of my residents and have fought it tooth and nail when it did,” she says. “I discuss the importance of advanced care planning and to normalize talking about dying. I am empowering my team with information and support to provide excellent care to our long-term care residents. My goal has been to ensure that everyone I care for receives the most thorough and best care possible.”

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