Longtime Chief Executive of Sharp Hospital Resigns

The head of Sharp Memorial Hospital in Kearny Mesa has resigned after almost 20 years of building it into one of the region’s most prominent medical institutions.

The resignation of Dean M. Crowder was accepted Tuesday by the board of directors of San Diego Hospital Assn., which oversees the numerous hospital, clinical and convalescent facilities grouped together as Sharp HealthCare Inc., of which Sharp Memorial is the centerpiece.

The board elected general counsel Peter K. Ellsworth as chief executive officer of the association, effective March 25, and named him to the newly created full-time position of president of Sharp HealthCare. San Diego businessman James C. Haugh resigned the voluntary position of board president and was elected chairman of the board.

In a resignation letter to Haugh, Crowder said that “now is an appropriate time for me . . . to request early retirement and transfer my executive duties.”

Crowder joined Sharp as hospital administrator in 1967 and had been the association’s chief executive officer since 1981. Under his direction, Sharp expanded from a single hospital into a wide-ranging system at the forefront of marketing strategies to cope with the new era of medical competition for patients.

The Sharp family today includes Sharp Memorial, Sharp Cabrillo Hospital, Sharp Health Services, Shall Knollwood Convalescent Hospital, Sharp Senior HealthCare, Sharp Rees-Stealy Corp., Infusion Therapy of San Diego, Sharp Properties and Sharp Hospitals Foundation.

Sharp’s purchase last fall of Rees-Stealy Medical Group, the county’s oldest medical group practice, caused some dissatisfaction among private doctors long associated with Sharp and led to some friction with Crowder, a former Sharp associate said Tuesday.

The 90 physicians associated with Rees-Stealy became employees of Sharp after the merger, which Sharp wanted as a means of aligning doctors tightly to the hospital and thus ensuring that their patients would be sent to Sharp instead of other hospitals.

Although such alliances are a strong trend in the medical world today, the former associate, who asked not to be named, said that private doctors who had long had relationships with Sharp were upset that Rees-Stealy practitioners could receive preferential treatment. Those doctors were upset mainly that Crowder had not closely consulted with them before culminating the Rees-Stealy agreement, the former associate said.

Ellsworth, in accepting the post left by Crowder, will resign as president of the law firm of Ellsworth, Corbett, Seitman & McLeod. Ellsworth has been general counsel since 1977.