FTC: You’ve made an interesting point recently about how the need in healthcare is not just for nurses, and while they’re critical, solving that shortage and the shortage of healthcare workers of many types, is a long-term project. It’s interesting how many other kinds of positions that the technical colleges train for that the hospitals require.

HW: My background and training is in pharmacy. So, I’m one of those “other workers” or at least I was at one point in my career. When I look at my organization, certainly nurses are a critical piece, but we’ve got other areas where we’re desperately going to need help. The one that’s now on our front burner is the medical technology field. We’re to the point now where it’s getting very difficult to find qualified people to run our labs for us. That just happens to be the one that’s on my desk this week. Prior to that, we had an opening for a pharmacist that stayed open for a period of time while we tried to attract someone – that was a difficult position to fill and required us to adjust our salaries and bring them more in line with what retail pharmacy pays, which is considerably more than what hospital pharmacies have traditionally paid.

Over the last year, we’ve dealt with many different personnel needs. One comes to the forefront for a period of time, and we solve it temporarily and then another one presents itself. We go from lacking med techs to lacking pharmacists; lack of radiology technicians becomes a problem from time to time. Certainly, nurses – we have about a dozen nursing positions that we could fill now, and, of course, this is another time where Columbus Technical College comes into play. I see Bob Jones [president of Columbus Tech] at Rotary – I’ll stop and we’ll chat a bit, and he comes by my office several times a year. We talk about the needs of the hospital and the needs of Columbus Tech, and they help us and we help them. We’re pleased to employ their graduates. We talk about what we can do to assist them in gearing up to train additional workers. And we’ve made a substantial cash donation to Columbus Tech for faculty to train our workers.

I don’t know what we’d do without Columbus Tech at this point in time. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I’m on the leading edge of the baby boomers, and it’s very well publicized in our industry that as you cross that 55 barrier and move on up, the number of hospital days grows exponentially. We’ve got a great big bubble coming along and hospital utilization is about to go through the roof, and as it does, there’s going to be a severe crunch in the healthcare industry. I don’t know how we’re going to take care of all of us.

FTC: And there are other demographics that are significant, too.

HW: Let’s take nurses, for example. When you review those demographics, you see that the average nurse is in the 45 to 50 year-old range, and most of them say they’re going to work another six to ten years, something like that. So you’ve got not only the baby boomers coming along, but there are huge numbers of them who are nurses and they’re going to be retiring. We’ve got to figure out some way to replace those folks.

I’ve got a daughter who is a senior in high school, and I’m trying to steer her towards nursing. She’s an excellent student, and maybe I’ll successfully accomplish that. I’m trying to get her to be a nurse practitioner or a CRNA or something along those lines. But what’s happened to us over the past 15 to 20 years – and it’s a good thing in so many ways – is that women, in particular, have so many more career choices than they used to have.

One problem is the perception of what nurses do has not changed to reflect the reality of the growing responsibility and specialized technical skills nurses use. And I don’t know if people know about the alternate careers for nurses, and the various developments within the nursing field – the nurse practitioner and the CRNA options, for example.

FTC: And do you feel that you are planning for the future with Columbus Tech?

HW: Oh, without a doubt. In fact, we’ve got several interesting things that we try to do at the hospital level to get people into the programs at Columbus Technical College. For example, our auxiliary – we’ll provide anywhere from six to twelve scholarships every year for people, some of whom find their way into Columbus Tech’s programs.

We’ve got a program in our corporate office called HCA Cares, which is a scholarship program open to any unemployed person who meets certain basic criteria. We’ve earmarked $10 million dollars – we put up $5 million and the U.S. Department of Labor puts up the other $5 million. So there are tremendous amounts of scholarship dollars out there in the system for those who want to pursue nursing as a career. And there are not the only scholarships – there’s a lot of money available for people who want to go into nursing, particularly through Columbus Tech.

And these jobs provide a good future. I think there are very few programs that you can go through and spend a couple of years and come out and make the kind of money we’re paying our nurses these days. It’s a good deal.

Bob Jones has told me they’ve got some interesting plans for expansion over at Columbus Tech. We’ve got a good thing going here.

FTC: Why do you think things seem to work well in Columbus in terms of businesses and organizations working together in terms of trying to develop the workforce?

HW: My thinking on that is that it goes way beyond healthcare. I think it started with Synovus working with the University System. People stand up and take notice when they see Synovus do something like that. Also, I think we’ve had good leadership in this city, at least that’s what I’ve seen since I’ve been here. I arrived in ’95, and I think Mayor Peters and the Council and Mike Gaymon over at the Chamber work together well. I’m not going to say it’s perfect, but we work together quite well as a group. People see that at least we’re all trying to pull the wagon in the same direction, instead of fighting each other.

For example, we compete vigorously with The Medical Center, but it’s in both of our interests to make sure that we’ve got a highly trained workforce to help us both out. And it’s the same situation with St. Francis – our interests in the workforce and the community are interests that we have in common.

A lot of it is having good leadership. And Mayor Elect Poydasheff is going to continue that tradition. It just ties into a pretty nice package. We all are concerned about the community and the direction it’s going in and Columbus Technical College adds value to our city.

FTC: Anything else you’d like to add?

HW: Just that we really appreciate Columbus Technical College and the efforts of Mr. Jones and his staff. They communicate well with us, and they make it work.