FTC: Let’s talk about the strong connection between Columbus Regional Healthcare Systems and Columbus Technical College.

LS: I’m very comfortable with that, and can talk about what really has led us to the relationship that we’ve established with Columbus Tech within the past year or so. We’ve forever, I guess, had some sort of relationship with Columbus Tech for training of health professionals. But we made a very conscious, major decision to align ourselves with them in a long-term partnership sort of way when we made the decision to move in the direction we took just a few months ago.

Image really is a very important aspect of all of this and Dr. Breeden certainly has walked the walk and talked the talk. I had some trepidation, quite honestly, when we learned a few years back that Columbus State University was choosing to no longer train associate degree nurses, that they just didn’t see that as part of their mission. It concerned me, at first, that we might lose that program altogether in the community, but we quickly realized that Columbus Technical College had interest in picking it up.

FTC: And those two-year nurses are very important to today’s healthcare organizations, are they not?

LS: They’re critical, they’re absolutely essential to the success of the healthcare organizations here in Columbus. Even though I already had a lot of insight into Columbus Tech because one of our vice presidents, Jean Hartin, had served on the technical and adult education board for many years, and she’s kept me well versed on what was going on in that arena. I also had the privilege myself of being on the foundation board of Columbus Tech a few years back. But even with that kind of background and knowledge, a few years ago when the announcement was made that Columbus State was pulling out of that two-year program, I was a little concerned, and, frankly, I think if I were to trace the roots of that concern, it would be image. Would we in fact be able to attract high-caliber nurses to that Columbus Technical College environment. Now this would have been maybe four years ago.

What I’m proud to say today is that the image of Columbus Technical College has changed dramatically over the last three or four years, due to the leadership of Dr. Breeden and Bob Jones and lots of other people affiliated with Columbus Tech. They’ve been out in the community; they’ve been totally connected to the community. The physical facilities that they have developed and proposed that be developed in the future I think have captured the interest of students. I think that’s borne out by the enrollment that they’ve enjoyed in the last two to three years; I understand that they’ve doubled their enrollment in the last three years.

So all of those concerns certainly have drifted away in the last couple of years as the program has been geared up and is now in operation and is about to graduate its first class. All of that is just to say that the focus on image – backed by quality education – was an essential focus. I’m glad to see that Dr. Breeden and others have recognized that.

FTC: The partnerships are really strong and effective, and that’s certainly good for the community and, ultimately, for Georgia.

LS: That leads into the change that we made that I was talking about earlier. Bob Jones came to me, it was probably a couple of years ago, a year and a half at least, and said, “Look, we’re starting this nursing program, and we really don’t have all the funding we need to do it the way we’d like to do it. We’d like for you to consider making a significant financial contribution to support the nursing program at Columbus Tech.”

I understood what he was saying; he actually gave me a proposal of some sort as well, and it mirrored some things that had been done in other communities like Athens/Clarke County. And I just let it sit dormant because at that point, just to make a financial contribution didn’t appeal to me very much. Every time I would see Bob, which is quite often, he’d make a little bit of a comment about it.

Finally, I decided to look at it much more differently from our perspective, and I pulled together our vice president of human resources and some other folks, including Jean Hartin, vice president of nursing; our hospital CEO, Lance Duke; and our senior vice president, Tom Titus, who’s involved with marketing and communications and planning and governmental relations. I mention all of those people because it took all of those people for us to sit down and reassess where we were going as an organization and how we were going to best meet our long-term employee needs in the area of health professionals, particularly those that Columbus Technical College trains.

To get there, what we really wound up doing, was completely revamping how we go about doing things and we created a new relationship with Columbus Technical College. So, rather than just send them money to support a faculty position and rather than design a program that we thought would work, what we did was call Bob Jones and his folks in and say, “Look, we want a long-term relationship. We want a partnership. We want to make this family. We want you to understand our issues; we want to understand your issues. And then let’s forge a relationship that meets all of the identifiable goals of both organizations to the maximum degree possible and develop something that will be long-lasting.”

And that’s really what we’ve done. We made a $300,000 multi-year commitment to them that actually continues to roll forward. We right now would not envision it going away. It involves much more than just giving them some money each year. It redevelops our employee-education program, our tuition-reimbursement program that we’ve operated for many years for our workforce. It streamlined a lot of relationships so that our employees could go to Columbus Technical College much more easily. It eliminated the requirement that employees pay for their educational expenses out of pocket and then get reimbursed later because we worked it out where we would advance the funds through Columbus Tech and they handle all the paperwork. They handle everything for us.

I think what we’re going to end up getting out of this is more highly qualified people that are already in the workforce going back for advanced technical and professional education that they might not otherwise have sought. We’ve built into this whole process with Columbus Tech a feedback loop so that we’re continuously evaluating the successes, the failures, the opportunities for improvement. We’ve only been in it for half a year or so, but I can tell you the working relationships are extraordinarily effective and that our organization and Columbus Tech and, I’m sure, the students, are all going to be the beneficiaries of this working relationship. It’s family. You’ve got to realize that it’s more than a partnership if it’s going to be successful long-term. You’ve got to really get down to the point where you’re treating each other like family.

If you just give money, you don’t really know what you’re expecting. You’re just going to put some money out there. What we did, because of the working relationship and the way we communicated through this process, was we did not try, we are not trying to dictate to Columbus Tech what they need to do, or how the money that we’re assisting them with needs to be spent.

We trust them to use it in the most appropriate way, and we give them the latitude to be able to do things that they might not otherwise do. It would have been very presumptuous of us, I think, to have dictated how those funds would have to be expended. So, if you can’t work like family members, and if you can’t have a high level of trust as we do in this case, I think it would be very, very difficult to develop the level of relationship that’s evolving.

FTC: You’ve said that Columbus Regional Healthcare “expects quality hires from Columbus Tech,” that you “can count on them.” Anything more specific about the people they provide you or the kinds of positions that you rely on them for?

LS: By working hand-in-hand with Columbus Tech all the way through the process, what we are able to do is convey to them and to their faculty members and, ultimately, to their students, who we are as an organization and what our needs really are. We have involvement, really, all the way down to the classroom. Because of this relationship that we’ve got with them, we do have the opportunity to have some of our key professionals in nursing and other key careers, meeting with students, helping to educate them. What it establishes clearly, from the beginning, is what our expectation of quality really is and what a dedicated employee really needs to be in order to be successful in our organization. I think it’s given us the chance to be as close to training our own workforce as you can get without actually being the educator in your own right. It’s a really unique opportunity we’ve got to convey our expectations right in the middle of the classroom, and then Columbus Tech helps us turn out a product that meets that expectation.