Customer service is key to new WCH administrator
By ROBERT BRYAN
Friday, December 7, 2007 9:41 PM EST
At an interview shortly after assuming her CEO duties at Wabash County Hospital, Marilyn Custer-Mitchell hinted at her top priority - to desock health-care consumers in this area.
“I think there are things we can do in employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction: We can take it to the next level,” she said, identifying two of her early goals.
There are times, she said, when WCH will have the same state of the art gadgets as its giant neighbors, but mostly not. Where the hospital can compete, she said, is in service - “treating you like a person, not a number.”
“What we need to do is knock peoples' socks off with service.”
Actually, she believes the hospital is well on its way to that goal:
“We need to keep moving forward. The hospital is in good shape. It's had some really good years financially, and the culture is positive. We need to keep that going, first and foremost.”
She spent most of her first weeks here meeting hospital people in informal settings: “I've been trying to get around to some of the doctors offices, make the rounds in the hospital to meet the staff. People tend to give you a week or two before they start bringing you issues.”
And the holiday season are a good time learn about a hospital and its people, for the business side of things traditionally slows down.
Custer-Mitchell, born in Gary and raised in Chesterton, would know about hospital cycles, for she's a 25-year-veteran in health-care administration.
She comes to Wabash after serving two years as president and chief operating officer for Corning Hospital in Corning, N.Y. Before that she was in administrative positions with Jewish Healthcare in Louisville and Union Hospital Health Group in Terre Haute.
She received her master's degree in health administration from Indiana University in 1986. She and her husband, Pat Mitchell, live in The Gardens. They have a 10-year-old son, Joseph Patrick, at Metro North Elementary.
The Corning Hospital she comes from is about three times the size of WCH, but several factors were at work bringing the family back to Northern Indiana, not least friends and family on both sides still in the Chesterton area.
“I also think my personality fits the smaller size hospital,” she said. “You get to know people better and you can effect change faster. Larger hospital are like ships: They're harder to turn.”
Experienced working in huge healthcare networks and in smaller independent institutions like WCH, Custer-Mitchell has found neither inherently better than the other.
The huge networks bring lots of capital and vast expertise member hospitals can draw from, but, depending on leadership, those networks can tend to ignore the needs of smaller units and perhaps get bogged down in bureaucracy.
“To me, it's exciting to be independent,” she said, laughing, and acknowledging that if WCH gets bureacracy-bound it will be her own fault.
If there is a standard life-path into health care administration, Custer-Mitchell didn't take it.
“My mother was a teacher, my dad a lawyer.”
In college she was studying recreational therapy, which helped her get a job in a Michigan City nursing home as activities director and coordinator of volunteer services.
“I loved that job; it was a blast but I couldn't make a living doing it, so she went back to school, thinking she might teach her best subject, math.
But then a psychiatrist friend of the family suggested she might try health care administration.
It was a perfect fit, “though I just kind of stumbled into it.”
Off duty these days, when not thinking of ways to desock area healthcare consumers, Custer-Mitchell likes to spend time with husband and son, read, play golf, watch high school and college basketball.
“I'm excited to be here. I'm having fun.”
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