Linda Jameson, Eastern Plumas Health Care’s new Director of Nursing is in an interesting position. Right now, she’s in her last month as Chief Nursing Officer at Plumas District Hospital (PDH), where she’s worked since 2005. She’s clearly loved her job and is well-loved in return at PDH, so this last month has been an unusual transition.
“I’m not a lame duck, I’m a dead duck,” she said. “It feels like dying. You try to give your best advice before you go, try to lay down a foundation on how to deal with different things.” There are other staff members who have moved on and are working as if she’s already gone. “It’s like watching it go on without you,” she observed. Jameson added that PDH’s Chief Executive Officer Doug Lafferty has been very supportive of her during this process.
Her mind is on the future, however. “It’s like a new home. Not just moving, but building a new house. There’s a sense of creativity and energy. It’s very different. At PDH, I walked in with no training, but the programs were set up. The house was built. This time, I feel like I’m recreating myself—at least that’s my hope.”
Jameson is very aware that she needs to be sensitive to the staff already in place at Eastern Plumas Health Care. She likens it to building a new house with the crew that’s already on site. “It’s important to understand the culture of the new place,” Jameson acknowledged. “I don’t know them [the staff] at all.” Still, she finds that exciting and challenging, as well. “I know I’m going to work harder building this, but I want to do that.”
For Jameson, creating a new life, starting fresh, also means going home. She lives in EPHC’s district and says that she’s felt like an outsider at times at PDH. She can’t vote there, and it was particularly pertinent when she was Interim CEO and under consideration for the permanent CEO position. She was told she’d have to move to the Quincy area in order to be considered for the job. But, EPHC is also home because she started out here, working at the hospital from 1997 – 2002 as a staff nurse in Emergency Room and Acute Care.
Prior to coming to EPHC, she’d worked in large hospitals doing critical care. This was her first taste of rural health care, and she loved it. “I loved the patients,” she said. “I felt I could do a lot of good here—it’s in-depth and personal.” And, strangely, it felt physically familiar. The floor of the EPHC building had the same feel to it as the one where she started—at Harbor General, UCLA, Critical Care. “It had a feel that took me back that I liked,” said Jameson.
In addition, she admitted her own aunt to the skilled nursing facility here. “So, you really do take care of your family and friends. I loved that I knew my patients,” she said. “I love coming back to where I started—back in that same building.”
Jameson is very well liked by her staff, and her reputation precedes her here. She gave a window into her management style. “I don’t want to hear anything negative. Everyone starts with a clean slate. That’s very empowering.” She allowed as how small town gossip can be insidious as well as incorrect. “They get it wrong. It’s an infestation of the organization and the hardest thing to stop.”
Besides emphasizing a positive new start, Jameson said that fairness and honesty are very important to her. For both herself and her staff, she feels “it’s okay to make mistakes. You say, I’m human, I’m not perfect.” She also believes in “transparency”–you admit your mistakes and then you learn from them.
Jameson said she learned good communication skills and an understanding of motivations in a school of hard knocks—a lock-down mental health ward. “Dealing with it on a life and death level, you get a different philosophy of how to talk to people—you respect the power of the human mind.”
Jameson was very clear about her reasons for coming to Eastern Plumas Health Care. First, she said, she really likes the Board of Directors. EPHC “has a Board I respect. No one person is too strong. It’s a very committed board and bias free.” Second, she’s a part of this community; she likes the idea of coming home. A third “big motivator,” she said, “is CEO, Tom Hayes. I like Tom’s style. I bonded with him when I took over as Interim CEO of PDH. I think he’s a class act.” She appreciated his openness and also his willingness to listen and to give her advice. “He was someone I could talk to in confidence and I knew it would stay confidential.”
She added that she’s confident they’ll work very well together, as they have similar styles. Also, he lets his managers make their own decisions, which she appreciates. “I’m very loyal to the CEO and the hospital,” she said. “And, I already know that Tom will support me. I can lift that from my shoulders.”
Hayes echoed her sentiments. “I enjoyed working with Linda when she was Interim CEO. I know she really wants what’s best for our community, and I’ve been impressed with her expertise. She’s committed to improving health care at EPHC.”
When asked what she hopes to accomplish, Jameson sits up straighter. She’s clearly given this plenty of thought. First of all, she’s interested in creating educational opportunities for the nursing staff. “That’s the number one thing,” she said, “for nurses to have resources.” Because a small, rural hospital has limited resources and limits to the extent of staff experience in certain areas, it’s great to bring top quality educators in. “We can’t all be experts,” she said. She hopes to network with PDH and with other interested community members to provide classes locally. Further, she hopes to entice both nurses and physicians to participate.
A second vital accomplishment, she said, is to come to understand the “culture and needs of each individual within the hospital.” Everyone plays an important role, she said, and they need to work together to be successful. She said she looks forward to doing daily rounds, which will help her accomplish the staff integration she believes is so important. It will also allow her to go down a checklist of quality control measures to make sure that everything is up to standards.
In addition, Telemedicine Oncology and Diabetes are big interests. “It’s a perfect match for this community,” she said. She pointed out that EPHC was the first hospital to offer a Telemedicine Oncology Program, which connects EPHC cancer patients with Oncology experts from Tahoe Forest Cancer Center, under the guidance of Medical Director, Dr. Larry Heifetz.
Tahoe-Forest is connected with UC Davis’s Cancer Center, which is one of only three in California and only 60 nationwide that are National Cancer Institute rated hospital systems. What this means for EPHC’s cancer patients, is that this tiny rural hospital has access to some of the best cancer specialists in the nation through its Telemedicine Oncology Program.
Jameson will also weigh in on EPHC’s Diabetes Telemedicine Program, which has the only diabetic retinopathy camera in Plumas or Sierra Counties. Through telemedicine, these diabetic eye screenings are sent to experts at UC Berkeley who read the images and, if necessary, make recommendations for further treatment.
The fact that all of this is available right here for EPHC’s patients is an arena of great possibility in Jameson’s eyes and a service of incalculable advancement for the patients she now will be serving. In fact, she said when she thought about making the move to EPHC, she “couldn’t come up with a negative. So many things are right—the right time, right place, the right time in my life. It feels pretty empowering to say that.”