THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 20, 1994 TAG: 9411230663
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 250 lines
THE JUXTAPOSITION was chilling. Right beneath the headline reading, ``Is Hospital Administration Dead?'' was a promo for another story: ``Decade of the Executive Women.''
``Look at that,'' sighed Barbara H. Biehner, chief operating officer of Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters, pointing to the December issue of Healthcare Executive. ``It's got to be significant that they put both those stories together in one issue.''
But Biehner hadn't read the stories yet. If she had, she would have realized that the very things the magazine said were vital for hospital administrators' survival - collaborative management, team building, strengthened communications and a focus on what's best for the community, not just the institution - are the very things women executives are known for.
And they're traits that Biehner - and three other female Hampton Roads health care executives - bring to the institutions they serve. Traits that have enabled them to, if not break the glass ceiling in health care, at least push it higher.
Vicky G. Gray
Tidewater Health Care
Vicky Gray is embarrassed. She has no horror stories to tell, no tales of harassment, of being left out of the inner circle, of having to claw her way up the ladder with the help of affirmative action programs. In fact, the only time she notices that she's the sole woman on Tidewater Health Care's senior management team is during a break in meetings, when the men disappear into the men's room, and she goes by herself into the ladies' room.
``It's a gender-neutral environment here,'' she says of the Virginia Beach-based health care system, which owns Virginia Beach General and Portsmouth General hospitals.
Gray, 39, was orphaned at age 9, and raised by her older sisters. ``My childhood is the kind of thing they make Monday night movies about,'' she says. ``With a start like that, the barriers don't look that daunting.''
She began her health care career as a dental hygienist in Tennessee, while working on her master's degree in public health.
Her first job in administration was as a planner for the Eastern Virginia Health Systems Agency in Norfolk, which evaluated certificates of need for expanding health care organizations. In 1983, she came to Tidewater Health Care as a vice president of planning.
She's never left, never looked outside the organization for new challenges and jobs, because she's found enough challenges where she is. One of the most exciting was running Portsmouth General for a year-and-a-half after Tidewater Health Care bought it in 1988.
More recently, her time has been devoted to building a regional network of primary health care physicians that can prosper in a managed-care environment.
But she doesn't take lightly the responsibility of being the system's highest ranking woman. She makes herself available as a mentor (``that's why I agreed to do this story'') and keeps an open door, and an open ear, to the women in the organization.
But her own mentors are all men: the system's Chief Executive Officer Douglas Johnson, its vice president for medical affairs, Dr. Hugh Mayo, and her husband, Mac Gray, a local health care consultant.
She and Mac, married nine years, deliberately chose not to have any children. It's a decision, Gray says, which has helped her focus on her career.
``But because I don't have children, I do spend a lot of time seeking and wanting to understand parenting issues in the workplace.''
She also sees many of the organization's critical issues - prenatal health care, aging and infant mortality - as women's issues, and questions sometimes why there hasn't been more progress on them. ``If it affected men more, they probably would have been addressed,'' she says ruefully.
As for the future - Gray sees one of two options: CEO of a health care system, or a singer. ``But,'' she admits, ``I can't carry a tune.''
Beth M. Duke
Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters
It was 1965, and Beth Duke was interviewing for her first job in health care - as secretary for the administrator of the 4-year-old Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters. He wanted her to take a typing test. She refused.
``But I need someone for this job who can type,'' he said.
``I can type,'' she said confidently. ``I can handle all the things you need a secretary to do. But I plan to do much more than that.''
He hired her. And Duke hurried to Granby High School in Norfolk, bought a typing book and spent the next week frantically honing her marginal typing skills.
It's almost 30 years later. And Duke, 52, has made good on her promise. Today, she's the senior vice president for development and community relations, one of four members of the health system's senior management team.
She's seen the hospital grow from a small family of 100 employees to the health care system it is today, with 1,700 employees, a home health agency, outpatient facilities and a mandate to manage the care of the region's children.
And from a glorified secretary, Duke has evolved into a powerhouse fund-raiser, able to wrest million-dollar pledges from area business leaders and close a $10 million capital campaign in just three years.
She's done all this in a time when women didn't work outside the home, at least not in jobs that didn't involve blackboards or bedpans.
But being a woman in a man's world, she says, was never an issue at CHKD. She admits it was hard not having any female role models to follow, but, with her typical Midwestern stoicism, she found her strength from within.
When things got rough, she'd remember her mother's words: ``If anyone could do it better than you, they'd be up there doing it.''
Today, she takes a personal interest in ensuring the success of her staff - 14 women and, for the first time, one man.
``I want them to have all the success and excitement and challenges I had as a young woman.''
Karen Corrigan
Sentara Health System
A year-and-a-half ago, Karen Corrigan, then director of system development for Sentara Health System, quit her high-stress corporate job to stay home with her daughters, ages 7 and 9.
It was supposed to be a time to reconnect. To figure out how to slow down after nearly two decades of 70-hour weeks.
But a few months later, her former boss and mentor Michael Keating was critically injured in a car accident. And Corrigan was called back into action.
Last month, Sentara named her vice president for system development, the first woman to join the corporation's inner circle, which leads the region's largest health system.
Corrigan cringes when she hears the words, ``first woman,'' although she does admit that the glass ceiling exists in health care administration - just as it does in every industry.
``It will probably take a few more years,'' she says, then laughs and amends her statement. ``Maybe decades, before the glass ceiling isn't real.''
She's even seen it in her 8-year-old daughter's co-ed baseball team, where the boys grumble if they're paired with the girls.
``She'd love nothing better than to be a really good professional baseball player,'' she says about her daughter. ``And I ask myself, when do you reveal the truth to them? When do you tell your daughter what the world is really like for women?''
There are times, she says, when she feels like her daughter - still on the outside in a man's world. But because she grew up in the Sentara system, starting 14 years ago as director of public relations at Norfolk General Hospital, she has an enormous support system within the organization.
And she views her gender as an advantage, not a roadblock. ``The issues I deal with are much more concrete. I have three children. I've spent time in the ER (emergency room). I've tried to get a doctor on the phone on a Saturday. I've watched the last hours of my grandfather's life after a horrible bout with cancer. I know how hard it is to work a full-time job and try to make a doctor's appointment in the middle of the day.''
They're all issues the health care system has to deal with as it enters the 21st century, as it is rocked by the waves of local, state and federal health reform, and as consumers demand more quality for less money, she said.
It is Corrigan's job to map the route Sentara will take over the next decade, to plan for the increasingly tumultuous times ahead.
It's a role for which her innate curiosity makes her well-suited. ``You have to always be asking questions. Probing where you are and where you can make changes to move ahead.''
Her impact can already be seen in Sentara's new corporate image campaign, which stresses preventive health care over caring for the sick.
``How do we make the community really healthy,'' she says. ``It can't be just through medical technology. It has to be a holistic approach, combining healthy living habits, our spiritual, psychological self, and our approach to community and family.''
Barbara Biehner
Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters
There's something you should know about Barbara Biehner. After seven years spent working for children's hospitals, the past six as chief operating officer for Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters, she still cries when she visits sick children.
It's just one of the very difficult aspects of providing leadership in a children's hospital.
``I try to manage my emotions, to work in a man's world, but I just can't divorce myself from what we do here,'' says the 37-year-old.
Throughout her career, Biehner has learned to function within the male-dominated echelons of health care management.
In her first job, as vice president at Chesapeake General Hospital, she was assigned all the ``softer'' areas of the hospital: personnel, telecommunications, the gift shop, volunteers. But Biehner wasn't content to be delegated to the ``woman's'' role. She kept asking for more responsibility until she got it.
That approach sometimes got her in trouble. Once, while working for Sentara Health System, she wrote a brisk, businesslike memo. Her boss called. ``You said what you had to say in that memo, but couldn't you have said it nicer?'' he asked.
``At Sentara, I learned I talked too fast,'' says this New Jersey native. ``That I was too direct and needed to be fluffier.''
Even at CHKD, she said, she feels women aren't ``allowed'' to be tired or angry. After one meeting, in which she calmly, but firmly, berated her staff for not handling a problem appropriately, she received four phone calls later from employees saying, ``You can't yell at us like that.''
``It's unacceptable for women to just have a low affect; we have to be smiling and bouncy all the time.''
And that's a difficult thing to do, especially given the stresses of her job this past year.
They include completing the new $72 million hospital addition in August and moving patients, staff and equipment into it; and juggling two jobs, her own and the chief executive officer's, made vacant when Stephen S. Perry Jr.unexpectedly resigned last year.
That created another, internal struggle of her own: did she want Perry's job?
She initially applied for the job but pulled her application out when she realized the board really wanted someone from outside the organization.
It was not an easy decision.
``I thought long and hard about it,'' she says. ``If I had put the board in the position of considering me and then I hadn't been hired, I probably would have had to leave if I didn't get it.
``I chose not to run. Although I believe in my strength and qualifications for the job, I don't have to play that role to be an effective administrator.''
Her effectiveness comes from not only calmly managing crisis and change, but from the hands-on approach she adopts. During the move, for instance, Biehner could be found scrubbing out refrigerators (``every nail is broken'') cleaning bathrooms and showing up at 4 a.m. to direct traffic and supply donuts.
She spent one night stocking supply carts in the new emergency room. The next day, an employee came up to her, shocked that he'd spent the night working next to the hospital's COO. ``Yes!'' she thought. ``It's working.''
But it's working at a price. The long hours she puts in - often working six days a week, 15 hours a day - mean less time with her 3-year-old daughter and husband.
Even being named as an ``up and coming health care executive'' by the industry's trade magazine, Modern Healthcare, doesn't quite make up for the missed family time.
``It's hard because I don't feel I'm giving enough to my family,'' she admits. ``I wish my daughter would quit asking me if I've had a nice day at work. She's always telling people, `Mommy is going to work.'
``If anyone looks at a children's hospital as a career, then they must know there's a real difference than in the experience of a community hospital. The needs of the parents and children are much more intense.'' ILLUSTRATION: JOSEPH JOHN KOTLOWSKI/Staff color photos
Beth Duke rose through the CHKD ranks, going from a secretary to the
senior vice president of development and community relations.
Barbara Biehner, chatting with Korie Fletcher, 2, of Newport News,
takes a hands-on approach as CHKD's chief operation officer.
Color photos
LAWRENCE JACKSON/Staff
Viicky[sic] Gray, who is the highest ranking woman in her health
care system, says: ``It's a gender-neutral environment here.''
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/Staff
Karen Corrigan is the first woman Sentara has named as vice
president for system development.
KEYWORDS: WOMEN IN HEALTH CARE PROFILE BIOGRAPHY by CNB