Over its history, Speare Memorial Hospital has evolved from its humble beginnings in a house as the Emily Balch Cottage Hospital into a 100,000-square-foot critical access facility.

In 1899, a group of women were behind the effort to start a hospital in Plymouth. “It was about the community wanting to take care of community members. And that was really the grassroots of the not-for-profit healthcare system that we have today,” says Speare President and CEO Michelle McEwen, FACHE, CPA.

The hospital was rebuilt in 1920 on a new location after a fire destroyed the original structure, but the community had outgrown it by the 1940s. Sceva Speare, a banker, had come back to Plymouth to visit a friend and saw the need for a modern hospital.

“He started the ball rolling by offering $50,000 towards a hospital if our community could raise $50,000 to match that,” McEwen says. Thanks to local fundraising efforts and a federal grant, a new 50-bed facility was opened in 1951 at a cost of $523,400.

“Everything back then required an inpatient stay,” says McEwen. “The concept of outpatient surgery, for example, just did not exist. We had less capabilities on the diagnostic and therapeutic side because of where medicine was at that time.”

Today, the facility has 25 private rooms but has more capacity for surgery, imaging, physical therapy, and services like oncology, cardiac rehab, and outpatient chemotherapy treatment. In 2010, a new medical office building was constructed, followed by the addition of urgent care in 2017 and a second location in Meredith last year.

During COVID, Speare was hard hit like other health care facilities with staff leaving the profession, a drop in revenue due to the loss of elective procedures, and supply chain issues that continue, according to McEwen. “I’d like to say we’ve totally come out of it, but we haven’t,” she says.

The focus is on expanding access to primary care, so two new providers have been added and more are slated to join in coming months. Additionally, the hospital is finding more ways to use technology to improve customer service and chronic disease care management. And the hospital is adding more specialty services.

“We have been doing bariatric surgery, but now we’ve added the component of medical weight loss management and supplemented that with exercise physiologist and registered dietitians and everything to help people with their journey,” McEwen says. “We’ve also just added podiatry, and we’re looking at gastroenterology. As our population grows older, their needs change, and we want to make sure that we’ve got the specialties that are needed to accommodate them.”