Nurses are usually the ones giving the shots. At FirstHealth, they are among those calling the shots. Nurses hold top leadership positions in each of the three FirstHealth hospitals.

Linda Wallace came to work at Moore Regional Hospital as a licensed practical nurse (LPN). She is now the hospital's vice president of Patient Care Services and chief nursing officer.

When Kerry Hensley was 14, she started working as a nursing assistant in her parents' nursing home in Biscoe. For the past 12 years, she has served as chief administrator at Montgomery Memorial Hospital. Since Montgomery Memorial merged with Moore Regional to form FirstHealth of the Carolinas, her title has been vice president of MMH Operations.

Cindy McDonald's first hospital job was as a teen volunteer in the old Scotland Memorial Hospital. Her first nursing job was as a nurse extern, and later an R.N., on a neurosurgical unit. Earlier this year, she was named chief operating officer and chief nursing officer at Richmond Memorial Hospital.

Sue Grady, whose first job was as an operating room nurse, is director of Patient Care Services at Montgomery Memorial.

Cheryl Batchelor’s first job was caring for OB/GYN patients. Today, she is executive director of Clinical Operations at Moore Regional.

Linda Wallace
Linda Wallace came to work at Moore Regional in 1966 as a licensed practical nurse. When the hospital opened its first critical care unit, she became the first LPN to work there. One day, the hospital’s director of nursing told her she was doing a wonderful job and really ought to be an R.N. Wallace said she would like that, but she and her husband couldn’t afford for her to quit work and go back to school.

“The director of nursing went and talked with the CEO, and they decided that the hospital would assist me,” Wallace says. “And the Hospital Auxiliary sponsored me to go back to school. Had it not been for all that support, I don’t know that I would have been able to do it.”

After Wallace became an R.N., she worked as a bedside nurse at Moore Regional for 10 years. She then taught nursing for six years at Central Carolina Community College in Sanford.

“I loved teaching and thought I would be in education the rest of my career,” she says. “But after six years, I was looking for something different, and the position of director of nursing operations opened here at Moore Regional.”

Over the past 17 years, Wallace’s responsibilities have expanded to include all of the hospital’s patient care services and several FirstHealth services outside the hospital including the EMS systems.

Kerry Hensley
Kerry Hensley began working in Moore Regional’s new medical and cardiac intensive care unit just three months after she graduated from nursing school.

“I liked the fact that, even though I was young and inexperienced, there was an expectation on the part of management and physicians that I knew enough to evaluate patients and draw some conclusions and pick up on early signs that something was going wrong,” Hensley says. “I really felt like I was part of the team in taking care of those acutely ill folks.”

After four years, she and her family moved away and she left nursing for a while to raise her children. Then she began working a few nights a week at Rex Hospital in Raleigh.

“I was in the float pool, so I went wherever I was needed in the hospital,” she says. “That gave me good exposure to what real-life nursing is all about. I gained a great deal of respect for the medical-surgical staff nurse.”

But the hours she had to work didn’t give her enough time with her children, so she left nursing
a second time. She was working at a part-time job in another field when the director of nursing at Montgomery Memorial called and said her staff development person was leaving. She asked if Hensley would consider doing the job 10 hours a week.“

That was in 1982, and I have been here ever since in one capacity or another,” she says.

From staff development, Hensley’s role expanded to include safety, risk management, quality assurance and medical records. She coordinated Montgomery Memorial’s first accreditation survey and, for a time, ran the hospital’s long-term-care facility.

In 1993, she was named hospital administrator, a position her father had held for several years in the 1970s.

Cindy McDonald
Cindy McDonald began climbing the management ladder early in her career. After working as a bedside nurse in several patient care areas at Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville, she became a night nursing supervisor, then the head nurse in labor and delivery. At the same time, she was working on her master’s degree in nursing and business administration, which she followed with a six-month internship with the vice president of nursing at Rex Hospital.

“I decided then that I might want to go the administration route, because that’s how you can make changes,” she says. “When you are a staff nurse, you take care of patients, and that’s why I went into nursing. But I quickly learned that if you want to change how nurses are perceived and what nurses do, you’ve got to be in administration.”

McDonald became director of women’s services at Rex, but found Raleigh too big and congested for a country girl, so she moved back to Scotland County and accepted a job at Moore Regional as assistant director of women’s services. She then moved into case management and became director of clinical performance.

McDonald was at Moore Regional for 11 years before accepting the job of chief operating officer and chief nursing officer at Richmond Memorial.

Sue Grady
Sue Grady grew up knowing she was going to be a nurse. She began her nursing career in an operating room. In 1981, she joined the nursing staff at Moore Regional and worked in a variety of clinical areas before transferring to the Information Systems department. She left the hospital in 1997 to join a consulting firm that helped hospitals implement information systems.

“It was a great experience, but the traveling got old,” she says.

She has been director of patient care services at Montgomery Memorial for the past five years.

Cheryl Batchelor
As a child, Cheryl Batchelor “couldn’t imagine doing anything but nursing.”

She worked in a number of patient care areas at Craven Regional Hospital in New Bern before earning a master’s degree in education and then teaching nursing for a year at Central Carolina Community College. But she missed the excitement of the hospital environment. She went to Wake Medical Center to return to the bedside as a staff nurse.

“Everybody said I was overqualified for that, but it was what I wanted to do,” she says. “I worked in the ICU and learned cardiac surgery nursing.”

That experience led to her being recruited by Rex Hospital to help start and manage its heart surgery program. Then, 15 years ago, she came to Moore Regional to work with cardiac surgery services as a clinical nurse specialist. Now she is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the hospital’s patient care services.

The heart of a nurse
Inside every administrator who used to be a bedside nurse, there still beats the heart of a nurse.

“I would love to be able to go out and work side by side with the nurses here,” Wallace says. “But even though I no longer have time to do that, I never want to lose sight of what goes on in the clinical area. My career has been a series of stepping stones, from the LPN level to the vice president level. That experience has been very beneficial to me in this job, because I understand the roles and the value of people at every level.”

Hensley says she thinks nurses are especially well-suited for hospital management, because they are accustomed to working with people in many different departments.

“You get to see the important role that every department plays in patient care,” she says. “And it gives you a good perspective on how essential it is for every part of the team to be strong.”

Hensley says her background as a nurse may give her additional credibility with Montgomery Memorial’s nurses.

“But it also probably causes me to have higher performance standards for nurses than for any other members of the health care team,” she says.

McDonald, like most of her nurse-turned-administrator colleagues, spends much of her time in meetings or behind a desk, but makes daily patient care rounds on the floor. On those increasingly rare occasions when she is able to work at the bedside, she feels right at home.

“If the nurses are having a difficult time with a patient and need a hand, I will get in there and help,” she says. “If you have a strong clinical background, you never lose it; it’s like riding a bike. I might not know how to use all of the new equipment, but you always know how to take care of a patient.”

Grady doesn’t miss hands-on patient care, she says, “because the part of nursing that I always liked the most was the interaction with the patients and their families, and I still get to do that. I go around and talk with patients and follow up with any concerns that anyone expresses.”

She also enjoys the teaching and mentoring part of her job.

“Sharing my knowledge with new graduates and watching them grow into capable, responsible nurses has always given me a lot of satisfaction,” she says. “I see my role now as making sure the staff here has what they need to do their jobs, and that includes education, encouragement and praise. The patient and family contact is gravy.”

Twenty years ago, if you had told Batchelor that she was going to be an administrator and not a bedside nurse, she wouldn’t have believed you.

“Sometimes I still have trouble being in administration because your heart may be telling you one thing and your head is telling you something else,” she says. “You have to make some difficult decisions. But I have always remembered what one of our physicians here told me: ‘If you’ll always focus on the patient, you’ll always make the right decision.’ So I try to do that, no matter how challenging the decisions are. Sometimes you make decisions that aren’t real popular with some people, but you have to do what you think is right for the patient.”

As executive director of Clinical Operations at Moore Regional, she has direct responsibility for a number of service areas. She spends most of her time on projects or problems that impact more than one department.

“That can be anything from helping design a patient care unit to analyzing financial data to dealing with a patient complaint or recognizing staff accomplishments,” she says. “I never do the same thing two days in a row.”

Unlike Batchelor, McDonald isn’t surprised to find herself in a high-level management position. She has always liked being in charge. In college, she was president of her freshmen and sophomore classes and president of her sorority. As a staff nurse, she was always volunteering
to take on more responsibilities.

“I’m not scared of long hours and hard work,” she says. “I would never ask anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”

When it comes to hiring and promoting people, she says, “My philosophy is that you need someone who can take your place if something happens to you tomorrow. You’ve got to develop the people who can sustain the programs you build.”

Hensley says she has always enjoyed the challenge of solving problems—patient care problems, operational problems, financial
problems or construction problems. She likes analyzing processes to see how they can be streamlined and improved.

“I try to be creative in addressing issues, thinking outside of traditional ways of doing things,” she says. “I enjoy change, too, when it’s for the better. And one thing we have seen an awful lot of, in health care and certainly here at this hospital, is change.”