PENDLETON — St. Anthony Hospital and Medical Center is paying $220,000 to improve the indoor swimming pool at the Roundup Athletic Club on Southgate.

The hospital owns the club and is making the investment while is adjusting staffing in the emergency room.

“The pool needed repairs a year ago and we hired one firm but it didn’t implement the repairs properly,” St. Anthony President Harry Geller said, “so we added a second firm. For quite a number of years we’ve provided the pool to the Pendleton High School swim team so it’s very important to maintain that pool as a community benefit and we didn’t think the community could do without an indoor pool.”

Geller said the pool is back in service and functioning normally after an approximately six month down time.

Geller also spoke about the hospital’s new contract with Vituity Physician Partnership and Healthcare Staffing Solutions, which will keep the hospital’s emergency rooms populated with health care providers.

“The previous vendor we used terminated the agreement,” Geller said. “It was in the throes of bankruptcy and was restructuring.”

Geller said the new provider will staff the emergency room 24 hours per day, seven days per week.

“We treat 13,000 patients per year,” he said. “The Vituity physicians will all have Oregon licenses and most of them come from Oregon, with some from Idaho or Washington state. There are a number of physicians in the tri-state area who have licenses in multiple states.”

Geller said the new staffing will create “no change whatsoever” for triage or other hospital procedures.

He said the initial contract with Vituity will run three years.

Geller indicated staffing a hospital can keep him busy.

“Every hospital has staffing challenges, and that’s across the board, from doctors to nurses to lab techs, X-ray techs, to security personnel, housekeepers, food service workers, and business office clerks. So it really hasn’t changed much since the pandemic.”