Hospice, ambulance director juggles both roles

Katrina Altenhofen has led Hospice of Washington County since 2016, but spent most of her career before that as a paramedic. She worked for the county’s ambulance long before it was government-run, founded the West Chester First Responder EMS service, and served as the state’s director of Emergency Medical Services for children for over 20 years.

In December, she found herself returning to that world, stepping up as the interim director of the Washington County Ambulance Service after Director Jeremy Peck was suspended from the position under still-unclear circumstances. A string of staff resignations followed in the weeks thereafter.

Almost a year later, Altenhofen continues to hold both jobs.

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Luckily for her, the two offices share a backyard. She makes the roughly 200-foot commute between the hospice building and ambulance barn every day, sometimes multiple times, using a gap cut in their shared fence a few years ago at her own request.

Unluckily for her, the work adds up to about 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

"I’ve always been a person that does, does, does, does,“ she said. ”For me, spending my birthday with the folks that support our hospice, that’s neat … and when I need to take some time off, at some point, I will. I’ll go do something.“

The hospice/interim ambulance director hasn’t taken a vacation since 2018, for the record. She doesn’t plan to retire in the near future, either.

Altenhofen said she had other ways to decompress. The list includes walking in the timber near her house, attending family gatherings, and catching a Kansas City Chiefs game.

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Altenhofen said she didn’t mind the workload. She credits her diligence to a yearslong battle with Lyme disease starting in 1989, which left her bedridden and frequently frustrated.

“As long as I’m upright and breathing, I’m going to make every one of those seconds count,” she said. “I’ve had a couple of heart attacks and a stroke from the Lyme disease, and there’s a lot of times I was not functionable at all … so I look at things a lot differently. Twenty-four hours is a gift to do whatever it is you wish to do.”

That’s not to say the momentum is easy to maintain.

As the leader of both Washington County’s only hospice service and the countywide ambulance department, Altenhofen’s attention is often needed at one place or the other urgently, schedules be damned. In true paramedic fashion, she describes those days as causing “heart palpitations.”

“The days (it) becomes the hardest is when there are demands on both sides,” she said. “You can guarantee the day I’ve got four referrals that come through this (hospice) door, we’re running three crews deep at the ambulance as well … so you triage. Which is the most important, where am I needed at, and who can I delegate?”

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With about 10 months of job juggling under her belt, Altenhofen said she felt both the ambulance and hospice services were moving in the right direction. Both sides of the fence have sizable projects on the horizon, as well as a growing sense of workplace pride.

"I hope so, I hope we’ve continued to move forward,“ she said. ”I’m one of those that, let’s get the goal on the table, let’s get it done, let’s keep it moving. So, things have not moved as fast as the pace I would like if I was just here, or just over there, but we’re still seeing forward progress.“

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com