Garth Pierce is a hospital president and CEO. He says this field can be
stressful.
"I think it is very stressful. You're dealing with sickness and health
and [everything related to] that. The number of people needed to make a hospital
run is phenomenal: doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the list goes on. You're
trying to do more with less in a world of rapidly changing technology. The
diagnostic equipment they have today I'd never heard of five years ago. The
drugs they have today I'd never heard of one year ago. So I guess you could
say it's stressful."
Pierce loves his hospital. He designed and built the facility from scratch
over 10 years ago.
"I'd say that's probably my biggest accomplishment -- the one I'll want
to tell my grandchildren about," he says.
Pierce says hospital administration was a career he happened across. He
was following a pre-medical program for his undergraduate degree when he talked
to some people about hospital administration. Something clicked.
"The whole field sounded so interesting. I was really excited," he remembers.
Pierce abandoned dreams of becoming a doctor and focused on hospital administration.
He graduated with a master's degree in health-care administration in 1965.
Since then, he's led a very successful and busy career.
Pierce has been the chairman of the American College of Health-Care Executives.
Not bad for a man who happened across his career! However, despite his success,
Pierce says there are days he still wonders about his choice of careers. He
says he loves it and is frustrated by it at the same time.
"Many Fridays I go home and wonder why I didn't choose something simple
like -- well, I don't know."
Pierce says money is the biggest cause of his frustration.
"I've closed a 28-bed nursing unit, plus taken other measures like losing
50 full-time equivalent positions. That means 62 people are affected. We can
transfer some to other units, but there is no getting around layoffs. That's
what we have to do to save five percent."
While Pierce doesn't like the human cost of downsizing, he says the exercise
of figuring out how to do things better for less is fun.
"Every day is different -- there's never boredom," he says.
There are still more men than women in this field, according to Fran Hanckel.
"I'd be silly to say there isn't a glass ceiling," says Hanckel.
"I sit on a board of directors for a hospital association -- and of 35
chief executive officers on that board, only three are women."