Returning to his Southern roots has been more than merely a homecoming to Reed Hammond. Taking over as chief operating officer at St. Francis Hospital last fall also represented a chance to serve an organization known for its emphasis on caring patient service.
“The South is just a different culture,” he said. “It is a different mindset that I can relate to well from growing up here. There’s a sense of trust and honor that goes back into the profession. When you’re able to work alongside physicians who do their job to care for patients rather than just to make money, it puts such a different perspective on what you do.”
The Saint Francis system’s adherence to Catholic values was also important to Hammond. “I’m not a Catholic, but my wife and I are very religious," he said. "So praying before board meetings and medical meetings and in staff meetings . . . that deeply ingrained culture here was very attractive to me.”
A native of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Hammond started his career in Florida, where for several years he played golf competitively, “but never at Tiger Woods' level,” he joked. After earning undergraduate and MBA degrees at the University of South Florida, he put them to work restoring profitability for a St. Petersburg automotive group and implementing a lean Sigma Six approach. (Six Sigma is a set of techniques and tools developed in 1986 and still widely used today for process improvement.)
Hammond grew up in a medical environment; his father served as physician and healthcare executive for more than 25 years. So when Florida’s economy suffered in 2008, the younger Hammond saw an opportunity.
“I knew there was, and probably always will be, a strong future in healthcare," he said, "even with the uncertainties of which way healthcare is heading. So I called my father and said I was ready to get into healthcare, if he would help me.”
The doors the elder Hammond opened led to growth positions with Health Management Associates, Inc., serving Mississippi hospitals in Brandon and Amory (as associate administrator and chief operating officer), and, most recently, to the COO role at Centennial Medical Center in Frisco, Texas — a Tenet Healthcare Corporation facility in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
One of the top challenges he faced when he joined the Saint Francis family last November was a need to differentiate the hospital from competitors such as Methodist and Baptist, which boast a significantly larger share of the market.
“We set out on a mission to change the culture in the operating room," Hammond said. "We want to be the easiest place to operate, the easiest place for a surgeon to come do his cases in the city.
In conjunction with that mission, he’s striving to enhance a reputation: “We don’t provide services to our patients, we create experiences.” The goal is to make those experiences so noteworthy that patients will serve as ambassadors, sharing those experiences with others.
Another continuing challenge is staffing, especially regarding nurses, he explained. “Nurses can dictate where they want to go nowadays — they are a rare commodity. There aren’t enough nurses coming out of school to keep up with the demand. In an ever-changing paradigm, it gets more and more difficult to compete with the agencies who are offering nurses to be travelers to take 12- to 16-week assignments — at astronomical rates" sometimes between two and three times the hospital’s normal base rate of pay.
His solution to addressing the nursing shortage involves consistent creativity regarding staffing strategies and helping nurses feel like a vital part of the organization. The plusses that Saint Francis offers them include those family-style values that impressed Hammond himself and attracted him to the job.
“Once nurses are on the floor and shoulder to shoulder with their co-workers, those nurses definitely stay," he said. "Those numbers are reflected in our retention and turnover rates. We measure our turnover annually, and we’ve gone from about 18 percent total facility turnover to less than 10 percent annually in the last 14 to 16 months. So that culture is certainly embedded here.”
When the hospital celebrated its 40th anniversary in December, “I was blown away by the number of current active employees that turned 40 with us!” he said. “They have a long tenure here — more than I’ve ever seen anywhere else.”
Hammond described an initiative that would create a more horizontal infrastructure regarding frontline staff, allowing them to be part of the solutions to their day-to-day issues, and consequently allow the organization overall to work leaner and smarter.
Other initiatives are still in development, pending new and rapidly changing regulations. Indeed, much of his job seems to focus on keeping up with multiple and changing aspects of planning and management — plus being visible, accessible, attentive and responsive to the concerns and needs of surgeons and staff.
“My greatest accomplishment,” he said, “is setting an example for those that I work with — showing that you can truly bring the faith you demonstrate to your family into the workplace and still have your family values there. You don’t have to be two different people at home versus at work.
“Physicians who come here will instantly find credibility and comfort, knowing that your patients are in good hands — because the providers and nursing staff taking care of patients here do it because they care about what they do. It’s not just a job.”
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