Driving force behind Bullhook clinic moving on

When she was a nurse at a local hospital, Cindy Smith had a vision to start a health facility. She nurtured that feeble concept from the womb of her imagination to its infant years, while it bounced around to various buildings in town, until it grew to the 70-plus employee facility it has become.

Now Smith, CEO, is leaving what she started.

People are being interviewed for her position but no one has been chosen.

Bullhook Community Health Center was a labor of love for Smith and the team of people who helped make it a reality. Smith plans to leave Feb. 15. By March she will be living in Oklahoma with her husband, who has been living and working there for a year.

Yes, she said, she will miss work, and the causes she's been involved in - she is on multiple local health-related committees and boards. She will miss her family - "my dad is 87" - and, especially, what she has started. But, she added, she looks forward to a break. It's been a decade of work, work, and more work. In Oklahoma, it won't be as easy to get involved.

"Part of the reason we are leaving is just so that I take a break, because I can't take on all the causes that I don't know about in Oklahoma quite so fast," she said. "I've put a lot of time and effort in over the last 10 years."

Unsurprisingly, a health center that aims to help people of all socioeconomic degrees, was sparked by the fiery troubles and challenges in her personal life.

"Probably the most impactful thing that started me off on this career is my husband died of suicide in 1992," Smith said.

It was a tumultuous time in her life. Before her husband committed suicide, Smith said, she was abused by him. Her ex-husband had sought help for his personal issues. He went to a treatment center in Minnesota, she said. But he was released too early because insurance wouldn't cover his treatment any further.

After her husband's death, Smith said she received her nursing degree. In the years to come she would work at Northern Montana Hospital and the Hill County Health Department.

Gaps in treatment - or no options at all for some - was what she saw as a nurse and helped her realize the need in Havre for a facility like Bullhook clinic.

"It was the frustration of trying to get connected with health care, working in the system, and then going to the health department and seeing an even greater need," Smith said. "I always thought in the back of my head that we need to do more for people."

A major pivot point was a conference she attended.

"There was another nurse and we went to this conference. And we heard a story about a lady in Nebraska who had worked in the health department and she started a community health center," she said. "So we were like, 'Maybe we can do that here.'"

She and her team worked together. She would have the vision, someone good at what she envisioned would do their part, and together "we locked ourselves in a room, wrote the grant and submitted it. It was a tag team effort, and that's the way it always has to be."

When she started looking into opening the health center, she said got some pushback. She was told it would take a long time to get grants, or reminded that the area already had a health center in Chinook. But she persisted.

"So we decided to write the grant for the health center. And they go, 'It'll take many years to get funded. Well, we got funded that same year."

Bullhook started out with a community center planning grant and an $800,000 budget, "and now we're over $7 million, close to $8 million a year," she said.

Bullhook first opened in September 2005 as Bullhook Clinic, part of the Hill County Health Department, after a county Health Consortium survey found that providing primary care to middle- and low-income people and people without insurance was one of the greatest needs in the county. It later re-formed as the nonprofit Bullhook Community Health Center after being awarded its full CHC status and grant.

The center continued to expand its services, including adding dental care, a pharmacy, and mental health and addiction counseling. It found funding to build the new facility it now is in, which opened in 2014.

Bullhook offers dental and mental health services that includes mental health counselors and substance use counselors. The health center also has a clinical pharmacist, an accredited diabetes education program and a child advocacy center.

Although she won't miss the long, harsh, and snowy winters, Smith is not ruling out coming back to Montana.

"Maybe we'll have our summer home here," she said.