Do all the good you can
by all the means you can
in all the ways you can
in all the places you can
at all the times you can
to all the people you can
as long as ever you can.
ó John WesleyBy Kathy Chaffin
kchaffin@salisburypost.com
When his grandfather died, Jeff Lindsay was amazed by how many people came up and told him how he had enriched their lives.
Even though he lived on a meager income and had limited resources, Joseph McNab found ways to help others in need.
“Anything he could do, he was always offering,” Lindsay says. “He was willing to do all the good that he could.”
When McNab had to be hospitalized later in his life, the community hospital in Dothan, Ala., didn’t have the resources to treat his complex health condition. In preparing for his transfer to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Medical Center, Lindsay warned his grandmother that the tradeoff for the higher level of medical services might be less personal care.
The whole family was expecting him to be treated as a number and not as a person, but that’s not what happened. Lindsay says the nurses, for example, even with their higher level of expertise showed great care for his grandfather and his grandmother.
They would have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary had he lived another year, and the staff understood how his sickness was affecting his grandmother.
That experience and the desire to follow his grandfather’s example led Lindsay toward a career in hospital administration. “I was interested in business,” he says, “and this was a way to combine that with the human element in a way to help make people’s lives better.”
Lindsay earned a bachelor’s degree in business from Auburn University and a master’s in health systems administration from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. After completing an administrative fellowship in Columbia, S.C., he worked for a health care consulting company in Pittsburgh before joining Novant Health in 1996 as the cardiovascular services executive director at Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem.
In 2006, Lindsay became the president of the new Presbyterian Hospital-Huntersville and chief operating officer of Presbyterian Healthcare North. He will continue in those positions while also serving as president of Rowan Regional Medical Center and chief operating officer of Presbyterian Healthcare East.
Since replacing Chuck Elliott at Rowan Regional on Sept. 16, Lindsay moved one of two framed quotes from his Presbyterian-Huntersville office to his new office at the Salisbury medical center. The words, “Do all the good you can…” by Methodist founder John Wesley, serve as a daily reminder of the way his grandfather lived his life and the way Lindsay strives to live his.
During this transition period, he works four days a week at Rowan Regional, spending much of his time getting to know the staff, patients and community leaders and coming up with ways to improve patient and employee satisfaction.
When news spread that Lindsay had taken over the helm at Rowan Regional, he says one staff member was overheard saying, “I wonder what the new guy’s agenda is.”
Lindsay is up front about his agenda. “We’re going to continue to work together as a team to provide the remarkable patient experience, in every dimension, every time.”
In any given conversation, he is likely to use the word “remarkable” several times. It is a key word in the vision of Novant Health: “We, the employees of Novant Health and our physician partners, will deliver the most remarkable patient experience, in every dimension, every time.”
Lindsay says he explains the “remarkable patient experience” to medical center staff as the kind of experience they would want their family members to have.
“We want them to say, ‘I got the highest quality and the highest level of clinical and medical expertise.’ We want them to say that access was easy and efficient … We want them to say, ‘from a caring perspective, I was cared about as a person … I wasn’t a number, a diagnosis or a room number, and they gave me what I needed.’ ”
When it comes to patient satisfaction surveys, Lindsay says he’s not satisfied with anything less than a 9 or 10 (on a scale of 1 to 10). “This idea of providing a ‘remarkable patient experience’ means for us that we have to keep getting better all of the time,” he says.
One way that Lindsay intends to do that is to expand the health care offerings not only at Rowan Regional, but in the surrounding communities.
The medical center now offers a critical care transport vehicle for patients that need emergency transfers. Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he says “it’s basically an ICU (intensive-care unit) on wheels.”Because Rowan Regional is now part of a large health care system, Lindsay says the medical center benefits from the cost savings in material management and supply acquisition. Systemwide, he says, “we save multiple millions of dollars.”
Specialists from other Novant facilities will also be coming to Rowan Regional so patients won’t have to drive out of town for specialty health care. Cancer care for children, for example, is now being offered at the medical center.
Lindsay says Rowan Regional also hopes to offer more services in the surrounding communities. “Our mission statement is ‘to improve the health of our communities one person at a time,” he says, “and our communities have told us they want service that’s closer to home, that’s easy to access and that’s high quality.”
In order to meet that mission, Lindsay says Rowan Regional and Novant Health are continuing their efforts to build a community hospital in southern Rowan. The state Certificate of Need Section’s decision to deny approval for Rowan Regional South is now in the appeal process.
“It’s evident talking to community leaders,” Lindsay says, “that that support continues and has only intensified. People in that community are very clear: they want a choice of health care … They want an alternative, and we’re going to provide it to them.”
What does Lindsay want readers of the Salisbury Post to expect from his leadership at Rowan Regional? “I just want to reinforce that we’re doing something that’s new and special through Novant Health,” he says, “and we’re now doing it at Rowan Regional. We are going to be the source of health care throughout the community, throughout this part of the region and we’re going to do something that’s remarkable.”
Lindsay wants to make sure everyone at Rowan Regional is aware of their vision at all times. Staff have started wearing pins that say “Always in all ways.”
“We know if we provide care that’s remarkable ‘always,’ that’s every time and ‘in all ways,’ ” he says. “If we get it right, then we will be achieving our vision.”