New Wright Memorial Hospital CEO John Woodrich has been on the job just over three weeks and is already well aware of the challenges being faced by rural hospitals.
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New Wright Memorial Hospital CEO John Woodrich has been on the job just over three weeks and is already well aware of the challenges being faced by rural hospitals.
Woodrich, who comes to Trenton from Manassas, VA, is replacing Ralph Goodrich, who is retiring, effective July 15.
A native of Omaha, NE, Woodrich began his career in the health care field while still in high school, working at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Omaha. He has also worked in hospitals at Columbia, MO, and Battle Creek, MI before serving as chief operating officer for Prince William Health System in Manassas, a position he held two years before taking the job at Trenton. Woodrich said his experience, in particular his job in Battle Creek, has prepared him for the work he knows is ahead of him at Wright Memorial.
“Wright Memorial is very similar to what I experienced in Battle Creek,” Woodrich said. “We were one of 38 hospitals within a larger system, much like Wright Memorial is a part of Saint Luke’s.”
While the Battle Creek hospital had a much-larger bed capacity, its operations paralleled those of Wright Memorial, which provides some primary services but also relies on the Saint Luke’s Health Systems to bring in specialists to “fill in the gaps” and provide a much more comprehensive medical offering to the community.
“And that’s something we’re looking at right now,” Woodrich said. “I’ve been visiting with the staff and in the community, trying to assess what the needs are and then working on how best to meet those needs.”
Woodrich said one of the biggest challenges facing not only Wright Memorial, but all rural hospitals, is the retention of professional staff such as physicians, nurses and radiologists.
“We have some good people here in those positions and we want to keep them,” Woodrich said. “But at the same time we know that we need to continually keep looking at what the community needs and recruit those individuals that will help fill those needs.”
Woodrich said the hospital is always on the lookout for new doctors and is in the process right now of recruiting at least two more family practitioners.
“We have what you would call a physician recruitment plan; if we know about a retirement that might take place in the next few years, we want to make sure we’re ahead of the curve and deal with it now instead of waiting when it happens,” Woodrich said. “We want to make sure we have a continuation of services and not an interruption.”
Finding the right physicians requires a lot of looking and Woodrich said getting those individuals to come to a smaller community takes some time, sometimes as much as two years.
“You have to find just the right match,” Woodrich said. “Many of the individuals we look at come from smaller communities and want to come back here because they enjoy the quality of life or they may be people who have lived and worked in the city for a few years and decide they want a little slower pace.”
As for the hospital’s continued affiliation with Saint Luke’s, Woodrich said it has proven to be an advantage for both the hospital and community.
“The services that we can draw upon by being a part of the system are tremendous,” Woodrich said. “Any time there is any type of regulation change associated with the medical field, there is usually a cost associated with that. By being part of Saint Luke’s we get the benefit of their expertise in implementing those changes, which save us time and resources. When implementing something new, we can find out how it worked, or didn’t work, in other hospitals within the system. It’s important to have that available.”