NURSE TO THE BOARDROOM — STAT
Nursing career led to corporate hospital leadership
By Joan Tupponce

Betsy Blair, RN

Betsy Blair's first job out of college turned out to be a turning point in her career. Blair had just graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in psychology when she began working at Tucker Pavilion in Richmond as a psychiatric assistant.

"That's when I was first exposed to hospitals and nursing," she says.
Blair was going about her duties when a patient started coding. She watched as the clinical staff rushed in and revived the patient. "I was astounded at the outcome," she recalls. "Here this patient was coming back from death."

Blair was so impressed that she immediately began taking courses to prepare herself for nursing school. She attended J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and graduated as an R.N. in 1980. When she moved to Broward County, Fla., shortly after graduation, she began working on the med/surg floor at Plantation General, an HCA hospital. After a year, she moved to ICU. She continued working in critical care after moving back to Richmond in 1983 and starting a job at Chippenham Medical Center (now CJW Medical Center, Chippenham Campus).

In just two years, Blair had moved into management-level positions within ICU. She continued in critical care until 1993 when she became administrative director of home care and hospice for HCA. "We started it at two HCA hospitals and then took it across the market to include all the Richmond HCA hospitals," Blair explains.

Betsy Blair in Honduras in 2005 with 2 children from the Our Little Roses orphanage, an Episcopal parochial school and home to Honduran girls who are from abusive or neglected impoverished environments. The school's mission is to give these girls the skill sets to become productive, educated and contributing Honduran citizens.

When HCA sold off its home-care and hospice arm in 1998, Blair continued with the purchasing company as regional vice president of operations. The next year she returned to CJW as administrative director of cardiovascular services. In 2001 she was named assistant administrator of Levinson Heart Hospital at CJW-Chippenham and began leading the planning team and working with the hospital-within-a-hospital concept.

"We took it from being a new building to really becoming a cardiovascular program," Blair says, noting that the hospital opened in 2003. "We had a whole cardiovascular team." In December 2005, Blair was promoted to chief nurse officer at Retreat Hospital, another Richmond HCA facility. "It was an opportunity to be a corporate employee at an executive level," she says.

During her tenure at Retreat, the nursing turnover and vacancy rates as well as compliance and patient safety standards all improved. Blair's success was noticed by HCA's management who in August 2007 promoted her to vice president of quality resources for the HCA Richmond Division. "Now I am helping to advance patient services and patient care outcomes for all the Richmond HCA hospitals," she explains.

Blair admits she loves a new challenge. "I am competitive," she says. She remembers taking a personality test when she was in a leadership position at CJW. Blair's scores indicated that she was an achiever and liked building teams. "It's not really about me," she says. "It's about what you can do to facilitate building a team and pushing them to achieve common goals and a common vision."

Betsy Blair administering a meningitis vaccination to a child in Sudan in 2007.

When she looks back, Blair realizes that her drive to succeed started in her teens. "I've always been interested in being ahead of the curve a little bit," she says. "At 17, mediocrity bored me to death. I didn't want anything in life that felt mediocre. I didn't feel like that was reaching your full potential."

In college, Blair had considered different careers that would allow her to travel. "I didn't want to be confined to one place," she explains. Nursing turned out to be the perfect choice. "Nursing allows you to do important work for patients and raising patient care in your community," Blair says. "It also allows you to have job opportunities across the country or around the globe. You are not confined to a state or place."

Nursing has provided Blair with the opportunity for international travel. A member of a St. James's Episcopal Church, Blair went on a mission trip to Honduras three years ago and then on the church's first medical mission trip to Honduras in 2006. "I coordinated the meds and did the fundraising," she says.

Just recently, she traveled to southern Sudan in Africa on a medical mission trip sponsored by her church. "We lived among the people and worked in the clinic," she says. "There was no running water, no electricity and no roads. We had two physicians and two nurses along with nine lay people."

Blair and the other medical staff would go into the fields to administer meningitis vaccinations. "We vaccinated over 4,500 people in two weeks," she says.

The field of nursing has taught Blair more than a just a skill. It has taught her the importance of interpersonal relationships. "I have gotten intrigued with organizational behavior," she says. "Each hospital in HCA Richmond has a different culture. You have to work within the confines of the people and the culture at that facility. You have to tap into those talents to move into the next level of development."

Blair is glad that she's taken some risks in her career. "You have to take on some new roles," she says. "Moving into another arena keeps you sharp. I feel fortunate that I have had the opportunity to work in different areas within the same company. I'm glad that incident at Tucker started me on this path."