Mexico couple wants to reopen Audrain Community Hospital and build a new hospital

By Lucy Caile

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    MISSOURI (KOMU) — Joseph and Donna Corrado have a vision of bringing more health care to the Audrain County community, and it starts with reopening the hospital the area already has.

The couple has worked in medicine in the area for decades.

The Audrain Community Hospital shut down back in March of 2022 when Noble Health suspended all its services at the hospitals in Audrain and Callaway counties.

But Donna Corrado said she saw the services start to crumble in 2018, when the hospital stopped providing anesthesia services and surgeries after 3 p.m.

That’s when she said she started thinking of a plan for a new hospital. It would provide emergency services like an emergency room, a surgery room and a maternity ward.

Dr. Joseph Corrado said he thinks the new ER is important for shaping the future of health care.

“Where’s medicine going and what do we need?” Joseph Corrado said. “We don’t need, like in the past, large hospitals that require lots of patients in the hospitals. We require the ability to do emergency procedures and take care of the population, mostly on an out patient services with very minimal in patient.”

Joseph Corrado said the plan for increasing health care access is two-phase, and the first part starts with reopening the Audrain Community Hospital.

“I think right now certainly we can open up our hospital once all our forms from the government and the state go through, we can open up [the Audrain Community Hospital] in less than two weeks,” he said.

He said he’s hoping that a new owner will help solidify the dream.

“It’s been very very taxing, and so not only for patients and for our emergency services, our ambulances have to go on runs,” he said. “Sometimes it’s simple stuff that they take all the way to Columbia and some patients have to wait in the waiting room for eight hours.”

Donna Corrado said she wanted to create a new hospital to help take that stress off her husband. She said his potential was being wasted by not having enough to do.

“He’s done a surgery where he put someone’s arm in their stomach because they had lost all their skin, but now he’s just doing more simple things like gallbladder removal,” Donna Corrado said.

She said she wants to make the new hospital as much of a community hospital that she can, to avoid the same mistakes that happened with the previous owners of the Audrain Community hospital.

ERDMAN Healthcare and Senior Living Architecture, a company from Madison, Wisconsin, helped with the design plans for the new hospital.

Now, Donna Corrado is working on getting county and city officials to provide funding. She said the timeline for the hospital once it gets going could be 16 to 20 months.

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