A highly skilled orthopedic surgery team is joining the Kimball Health Services medical staff, signaling the beginning of an entirely new service line at the Kimball hospital. 

Dr. Jeffrey MacMillan, MD, and Karen Wenner, APRN, DNP, his assistant and business partner, will begin their practice at KHS on Nov. 1, bringing with them the capability of doing total knee, shoulder and hip replacement surgeries in Kimball.

“We couldn’t be more pleased to have such skillful and highly regarded providers join our medical team,” said Ken Hunter, chief executive officer at KHS.  “The great thing about Dr. MacMillan is that he is such a versatile orthopedic surgeon.  While many orthopedic surgeons only do one type of surgery like and knee and hip replacements, he also does trauma, spine, foot, upper and lower extremity surgeries.”

Canadian-born, Harvard-educated and board-certified with the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery, MacMillan graduated in 1985 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia.  He now has 30 years of experience in the field.  

Wenner, a doctorate-prepared orthopedic nurse practitioner and surgical first assistant, has worked closely with MacMillan under affiliate agreements with hospitals in Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska; most recently at Regional West Medical Center in Scottsbluff. 

“Like I tell all our patients, Karen and I are two sides of the same coin,” MacMillan says. 

“That’s one of his favorite phrases,” Wenner said with a laugh.  “We’ve worked together for 10 years now and I think we do start to finish each other's sentences.  But I think it's also nice for patients because they have a male or a female to choose from.  We both complement each other in a good way and provide good patient care.”

Orthopedic surgeons diagnose and treat ailments and trauma affecting muscles, ligaments, bones and joints.  They treat sports injuries, degenerative diseases, tumors, infections and birth defects.  When needed, they regularly perform joint repair and replacement surgeries when other treatment options have been exhausted or eliminated. 

“The vast majority of orthopedic problems don’t need a surgery,” MacMillan said. “Surgery is really the last thing we try to do.  I typically employ a variety of medications or physical therapy modalities first.  But if (the patient) doesn’t experience satisfactory relief from their symptoms, then surgery becomes a choice.”

When surgery is needed, MacMillan and Wenner use high-tech equipment and minimally invasive techniques to do hip and knee replacements and prefer using MicroPort Orthopedic products, which they feel are the most anatomically correct and are key to rapid recoveries. 

The hip replacement procedure, for example, avoids cutting through muscles and tendons and sees about 80 percent of patients sent home within 24 hours instead of an average of five days.  As a result, recovery times are shorter and the operation is much less painful. 

 

MacMillan is very mindful of how he works with both other professionals and patients, including referring general practitioners and individual patients who select him because of a positive referral. 

“I do take a lot of patient referrals from friends, relatives, hospital emergency rooms and other physicians,” he said.  “I’m proud of that.”

Regardless of where patients come from or how they learned about him, Dr. MacMillan prides himself on delivering consistently high-quality treatment.  That includes those who have had less than satisfactory results elsewhere. 

“We like to see people who have not been satisfied or are not ending up with the relief they were anticipating,” he said. “There’s a challenge there and is satisfying professionally.  And it’s rewarding to take someone who is either in pain or broken and getting them back to function.  It’s obviously important for them, and it's gratifying for us.”

MacMillan and Wenner are big believers in giving their surgical patients every chance to have the best long-term results.  That includes insisting that patients are “medically optimized” before a procedure, meaning they must prove that any smoking or obesity issues are behind them.

“Ultimately we want to make sure that diabetics have their A1Cs and their blood sugars under control,” MacMillan said.  “We want to make sure that smokers are not smoking.  We expect patients to look after themselves in order for us to be able to care for them.  If the patients aren’t going to invest in themselves, how can we fix them?”

 “If you don’t engage them to make those changes and then they get that knee infected, what should have been a 3-month recovery is now one to two years,” Wenner added.  “And their result is never going to be as good as possible.  We’re not just trying to get them through the surgery.  We want them to have a good outcome and have a good result.”

The benefits of practicing in a new facility are not lost on MacMillan and Wenner, who believe Kimball’s new hospital will provide the space needed to grow their practice.  The expanded surgical department and increased inpatient beds will allow for more surgeries, and an enlarged rehabilitation department will have the capacity to work with more orthopedic patients both before and after surgeries.

“It’s an exciting time for the community, to get not only a brand new facility, but hopefully to bring a whole bunch of new providers to the community,” MacMillan said.

“It’s a great opportunity,” Wenner added. “There’s no shortage of a need for orthopedics here.  People are always finding ways to get hurt on the farm, with their jobs, with driving and not wearing seatbelts.  There's a big need in the area to provide orthopedics and give people more options for where they can get their care locally.  I think it's exciting that there's a new hospital coming that will offer more services than before.”