President of Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital will retire next month
After more than four decades in the healthcare industry, Jack Ivie, president of Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital, will retire at the end of next month.
Ivie’s retirement will be effective June 30, and Julie Sprengel, Dignity Health’s senior vice president of operations in the Southern California area, is expected to fill the position for a short time in order to get a sense of how to hire the right replacement, Ivie said.
Although he spent two decades away from Glendale Memorial, Ivie served as the hospital’s executive director and vice president of hospital operations from 1980 to 1992 before returning as the hospital’s president in 2012, this time under the Dignity Health banner.
Ivie’s return didn’t require much adjustment, he said, because he’d held leadership roles at two other area hospitals in the Dignity Health system. It also helped that many physicians and staff he knew were still there.
Still, he noticed that life at the hospital and the community had changed, Ivie said, and he immediately set out to rebuild the hospital’s identity in the community through a “humankindness” initiative that focused on how the hospital “touched” others and not just on how it treated them.
“People expect service and care like any other service industry right now, and I think that was a cultural change that we had to make,” Ivie said.
Instead of assuming company values are unquestionably accepted by employees, the campaign adopted the idea of “humankindess,” which Ivie said didn’t need a lot of definition. Its core is human behavior and its impact on others.
“People embraced it because they understood it,” Ivie said.
In a statement by the hospital announcing Ivie’s retirement released Friday, Robert Gall, chair of the hospital’s board of directors, said Ivie made three major improvements with the “humankindness” message:
First, an increase in “employee engagement,” which Ivie said was the result of allowing physicians and staff to discuss with each other how they could impact their jobs and each other under the idea of humankindness.
“Personal stories really resonate,” Ivie said. “We wanted [‘humankindness’] to be real rather than a conceptual program.”
Galls’ other two acknowledgments were the hospital’s increase in physician satisfaction and community collaboration.
Ivie said he and others made an effort to go out and learn personal histories from the complex cultural mix of people living and employed in Glendale. He worked to bring all those different life experiences into their roles as physicians and staff.
Aside from sticking to the hospital’s core values and mission, Ivie said healthcare still faces many challenges ahead.
“Dealing with both the social determinants of disease and getting people to take better responsibility for their healthcare — those have to be of equal importance as having the technology and the medical known-how to care for people,” Ivie said.
Ivie, now almost 68 years old, said he doesn’t see a return to the healthcare industry and plans to spend his retirement pursuing his many interests. He’s part of a book club, plays golf and is active in his church.
What’s Ivie’s advice to his successor?
“You have to be heavily engaged and connect with the local community. That’s the key to success,” Ivie said.
Twitter: @JeffLanda
