Following nationwide search

Skyline Hires First Surgeon

By SVERRE BAKKE
The Enterprise

Dr. Gianna Scannell wasted no time in starting her new duties as head of Skyline Hospital's department of surgery last Thursday.

On Friday, two days after 16 hours of driving from her home in Aspen, Colo., to her new job in White Salmon, Dr. Scannell was consulting with patients on upcoming surgical procedures she was scheduled to perform.

Scannell, a native of Italy, is the first full-time staff surgeon in Skyline Hospital's 52-year history. She oversees a department that is staffed with four registered nurses and two "scrub" technicians.

Her hiring concluded a six month nationwide search by Skyline Administrator Mike Madden and the public hospital district's board of directors.

"I feel this is a good fit for me," Scannell said. The hospital was looking for a surgeon who could offer state-of-the-art health care and I was looking for a place where I could be on my own and offer the kind of care I've learned to provide over the years."

A big part of what convinced her to relocate to the Columbia River Gorge was Madden's and the hospital board's vision for the modernization of Skyline Hospital and its health care services.

"Just by me being .here," Scannell noted, "surgical services can be offered right here, right now, so people don't have to travel outside the community for such care. I believe this community is growing and can support a full-time surgeon."

Another selling point for - Scannell, an avid hiker and skier and the owner of' four German Shepherds, was the Columbia Gorge itself.

"The mountains, the forests, the river ...who wouldn't want to live here?" she said. "I've never seen land this beautiful, and I'm from Italy"

Scannell, who grew up in a community similar in size to Bingen-White Salmon and ^.where everybody knew everybody,". brings nearly . 30 years of education, training and practical experience to the position of staff surgeon.

The graduate of the historic Universita Di Padova medical school in Padova, Italy, did her residency training stateside in general surgery at the University of California, Irvine in 1984.

She subsequently completed a fellowship in critical care at UC-Irvine on the way to becoming board-certified in her dual specialties.

In 1995, Scannell and her husband, Denis, a dive medical technologist and expert in the field of hyperbaric medicine, moved to Jacksonville, Fla.

While there, she served as director of trauma and critical care in the health sciences department of the University of Plorida for six years. Her department was featured. in an episode of the Discovery Channel's "Life in the ER."

"It was a very gruesome environment," Scannell said of working in a big-city emergency room. "We saw on average 25 trauma patients a day. These were people who were really messed up, had the worst kind of injuries imaginable."

Burnout from life in the ER and disillusionment with. university politics eventually led Scannell to quit Florida in 2001 and to join a private practice in Aspen.

During her years in Colorado's mountain country, Scannell learned several new techniques. One of them is called ultrasound-guided mammatome biopsy, which allows the removal of breast lesions in the office, under local anesthesia, thus avoiding a trip to the operating room.

"It's just one of the many recent advancements in medical care that Skyline Hospital is committed to making available to its community in the upcoming years," Scannell said.