This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. – Ed.
Physician Pam Cutler was recently appointed board chair of St. John’s Health after serving as a trustee since 2022. Before moving full time to Jackson in 2021, she practiced in Missoula, Montana, and spent summers working at clinics in Yellowstone National Park.
KHOL’s Jenna McMurtry talked to the longtime healthcare worker about the financial headwinds facing rural hospitals like hers and the role hospital boards play in responding.
Jenna McMurtry: Thank you so much for joining us today, Pam, and congratulations on this appointment and taking on this new role on the hospital board. To start us off, can you tell us, what does a hospital board do?
Pam Cutler: So, it’s somewhat unique. Because the public owns the hospital, there’s a board that is the governing body of the hospital and they are elected by the people. So, it’s the board’s responsibility to oversee and hire the people who actually run the hospital and do the real work, but the board is in charge of the governing aspects and we are elected by the people and that’s who we’re responsible to.
JM: To walk us back a little bit, how did you get into healthcare and then, ultimately, to Jackson?
PC: I got into healthcare largely because I went in the Peace Corps right out of college and worked in West Africa. I was a math teacher in my Peace Corps job, but I really was interested in international development and doing things that sort of made the world a better place and contributed to the improvement of people’s lives. I wanted to do something that was directly impactful and that would be applicable to working anywhere in the world.
JM: You’ve been on the board since 2022. What have been some of the most pressing issues that you’ve seen the hospital face? And, in general, rural hospitals like ours.
PC: Well, for our hospital, the first task we really had was to hire a new CEO when I was elected. And we did a really great job in hiring a really amazing CEO in Jeff Sollis. And then we wanted to work with Jeff and set up a strategic plan to have a framework with how you want to go forward and make decisions. And decide what direction the hospital should go in. But meanwhile, we had to still keep the hospital solvent and work to keep it running.
One of the big issues was workforce retention. It was the end of the pandemic and we had lost lots of staff and retaining staff was really hard. And, affordability was becoming more and more of a reality, of a real problem for our folks here. So, we decided to pursue the workforce housing project at the Hitching Post. That was a huge project.
Meanwhile, we were also expanding our services in oncology and orthopedics and trauma. We were taking over more primary care clinics and wanted to make sure that we had the staff to take care of all those expanded services.
The hospital’s been successfully making good progress at expanding services and making them more available. And meanwhile, always overseeing that the quality of everything we do is as good as we can possibly have it be. But that is all imposed on the background of what has always been an issue for health care, particularly rural health care: that the finances are very hard to have a good bottom line.
Rural health care is expensive. The needs are real and our ability to provide good quality care to the people that we serve has always been a focus but you have to do it in a financially sustainable way.
Our hospital is a county hospital. It is not for profit. We don’t send profits anywhere. So we don’t have to make a profit, we just can’t lose too much money. Our whole reason, our whole goal, our mission is to be here to serve people and to take care of the health care needs of this county.
Our job on the board is to understand what the needs of Teton County are and understand how a business model can work for a community-owned hospital in a community like ours.
