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Jeannie Sanchez Masters: ‘The Backbone of the Board’
By Laurie Larson
If you can manage a health care center, irrigate farmland, be a hospital board chair, oversee crops and livestock, judge elections, raise bond funds, lobby Congress, serve on multiple boards and ride horses, you might be able to keep up with trustee Jeannie Sanchez Masters. Born and raised in Questa, N.M., 25 miles north of Taos, Masters epitomizes her hometown’s culture.
“Jeannie is a microcosm of the community,” says Kean Spellman, CEO of Holy Cross Hospital in Taos, where Masters has been a long-time trustee. “She takes care of everybody, which is particularly archetypal of the [local] culture.” He describes the area as “tricultural—40 percent Anglo, 50 percent Hispanic and 10 percent American Indian.” As such, he says it is “very familial … the whole life [of the community] is centered around family, and that is reflected on the [Holy Cross] board and in the way Jeannie works.”
“If you’ve known Jeannie five minutes, she’s a friend,” says fellow trustee and incoming Holy Cross board chair Ron Burnham. “It is the nature of the community and the nature of the woman. She comes from the community, and she has a charisma that makes people like her.”
Masters served as Holy Cross’ chair from 2002 to 2006, but hasn’t left the board since she joined in 1985. She currently chairs the hospital’s personnel and professional affairs committees and also serves on its executive committee, quality council and quality improvement committees.
“If you know Jeannie, you know she’s an extraordinarily energetic and passionate person,” Burnham says. “She’s the backbone of the board. She holds everyone together.” And to think it all began by being overqualified for a receptionist job she applied for in 1984.
“I have a bookkeeping and accounting background and the Questa Health Center was looking for someone with that experience, but they told me I was overqualified and convinced me to apply for the administrator position instead,” she recalls. If that wasn’t challenging enough, the center had a significant fire that summer, and Masters began her new leadership position in November.
“It’s like what they say about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread,” she says. Operating from two mobile homes in the interim, Masters had to oversee the replacement center’s construction and remodeling. Fortunately, she had had prior experience working at a construction company that specialized in water and fire damage repair, “so I knew a little about that, but I had no medical background.”
Nevertheless, she says that dealing with medical staff was her favorite part of that job, from which she “semi-retired” in 1990, and this experience with physicians has made it important to her to chair the professional affairs committee at Holy Cross. “It’s imperative that medical staff needs are understood in order to retain them,” Masters says. “And they, in turn, need to learn the business side [of health care] from us.”
“Jeannie understands the physician’s viewpoint on provision of care and knows how to balance that with the financial needs of the hospital,” Spellman says. “She understands that people come to see doctors, not a hospital, but that you need to have a good facility to bring in good physicians ... She’s [also] supportive of the management team ... She’s a strong advocate for both sides.”
Similarly impressed with her understanding of the hospital-physician dynamic, one of the physicians at Questa Health Center recommended that Masters seek nomination on the Holy Cross board. She was elected as secretary in 1985—and found out three months later that the hospital was bankrupt. Not only was the 32-bed facility in the red, it was falling apart. Although it was, and still is, the sole community hospital in Taos (the next nearest one is 90 miles away), Holy Cross’ land and building are owned by the county, making it a public entity as well.
For six years, the board struggled to find a solution, and Masters says: “We got by on the seat of our pants and the grace of God.” Finally, a fellow trustee, who happened to be the state representative, had the idea to create a gross receipts sales tax—an additional .5 percent tax on everything purchased in the two counties the hospital serves over the following 10 years—to raise money to build a desperately needed new facility.
Because residents had to vote on the tax, a “blue ribbon committee” of Holy Cross trustees had to campaign locally for its passage. “We knew it was incumbent on all of us ... we all have a vested interest in keeping the hospital going,” Masters says. Residents “overwhelmingly approved” the increase, Burnham says, and in 1994, the new hospital was built. It has been operating in the black since it opened, Spellman says. The gross sales tax was retired two years early, and Holy Cross expanded to 49 beds in 2004.
Because of her governance expertise, Spellman nominated Masters to the AHA’s Committee on Governance (COG)—the association’s trustee policy-making body—where she served from 2001 to 2004. “I liked networking with people from all over the country. Everyone has the same problems, but we all handle them differently,” Masters says. “We got some of the ideas for our quality council from the COG.”
In the quality arena, especially, Burnham says,“Jeannie has a knack for getting past quality data and focusing on the key issues within [them]. She’s also really good at follow-up and asks for progress reports. She deserves a lot of credit for our current quality program.”
To get the ball rolling and initiate strong physician buy-in from the beginning, Burnham says Masters proposed a dinner with all board members and medical staff. “It was an informal environment, but we captured physicians’ concerns [about quality] and came away with the Lifewings program [a teamwork approach to quality used by the aviation industry]. And that let physicians know that the board expected their support of [the program],” he says.
Involvement in the COG also took Masters to Capitol Hill, where she began grassroots advocacy, visiting members of Congress with her fellow COG members. She has stayed with it, returning every year to the AHA’s Annual Meeting to talk with her legislators.
“It’s imperative that [our] congressmen see us and recognize us and know what we’re up against,” she says. “In order for this [hospital care] to work, our delegation needs to know how we expect them to vote.” She continues, “I keep going because of what we get out of it … and we have seen direct action because of what we say.”
But Masters believes strongly in the importance of local political action as well. She is a commissioner with the Taos County Planning Board, has helped find citizens for the U.S. Census Bureau and been the presiding judge for many local elections over the past three years.
In one of her more unusual appointments, she also has acted as secretary of the Llano Irrigation Ditch Association Board of Commissioners since 1993.
The ditches, or “asequias,” as they are called in Spanish, are crucial for the equitable distribution of all the runoff water from the mountains to the high desert farmland around Taos. Each asequia goes to a designated area where commissioners relegate the water to farms in amounts determined by acreage. With more than 15 acres of her own land, used for both farming and livestock grazing, as well as land inherited from her family, she has a vested interest in water distribution.
“It’s one of the oldest governmental, political action groups,” Masters explains. “The system of ditches [is necessary to] irrigate the land…. It has to be portioned out.”
Because of her involvement, her high visibility, but most of all because she has spent the majority of her life in Questa, Masters says she is continually approached—on the street, at the grocery store, on the phone—about patients’ experiences at Holy Cross, as well as what employees face.
“Jeannie views the whole community as her family,” Spellman says. “Her primary strength is her human compassion.”
She clearly inspires the same compassion in others. Masters’ husband was suddenly struck gravely ill last year. Together, the two of them decided he should receive palliative care at Holy Cross; he passed away in November.
“Everyone came to see us,” Masters remembers with emotion. “Nurses from the ED came in to cheer me up, doctors left our room in tears. Because we’d lived here all our lives, everyone knew him so well. The support was like family—and this is when you need people.” She adds, “I expect that same treatment for everyone [who comes to Holy Cross], and we deliver it. That’s why I’m proud to be a part of this hospital.”
Laurie Larson is the senior editor for Trustee.
This article 1st appeared in the December 2099 issue of Trustee Magazine.
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