Welcome

Gifford Medical Center in Randolph, Vermont, is a community medical center with family health centers in Bethel, Chelsea, Rochester and Sharon and specialty clinics throughout the area. Gifford is a full-service hospital with a 24-hour emergency department and an inpatient unit, Howell Pavilion. Gifford has a 30-bed nursing home, the Menig Extended Care Facility, which opened in 1998 on the main campus. The Birthing Center, established in 1977, was the first in Vermont to offer an alternative to the traditional hospital-based deliveries and continues to be a leader in low-intervention midwifery and family-centered care today.

Our Mission:

"As a community hospital, Gifford Medical Center's mission is to improve the health of the people we serve by providing and assuring access to affordable and high-quality health care, and by promoting the health and well-being of everyone in our service area."

Monthly health column

Read the latest health advice from a Gifford provider. This month's column is from sports medicine provider Dr. Peter Loescher. Dr. Loescher writes about tennis elbow, with a Vermont twist. He describes his work to build a stone wall and the injury that resulted. Here's an excerpt:

... With a how-to book and a crowbar borrowed from my neighbor, I set out to turn 20 tons of unearthed stones into a work of art. I wanted to be as pure as possible in my construction, and I committed in my mind to only use the tractor for rocks that I absolutely could not move by hand or with non-motorized tools.

What I developed, along with a deep respect for the settlers and farmers who built the stone walls that traverse our landscape, is a serious case of rock layer’s elbow.

Although this condition is known more commonly as tennis elbow, I can count on one hand the number of times in 10 years of medical practice that I have seen it caused by playing tennis ...

Read the whole column >>