Q&A with the Chief Medical Officer, Vice President for Medical Staff Affairs, St. David's Georgetown Hospital
By Suzanne Haberman
Friday, 12 March 2010
Dr. Jim Donovan, Chief Medical Officer, Vice President for Medical Staff Affairs, St. David's Georgetown Hospital
- Education: Medical school: The University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio; residency: John Peter Smith Hospital, Fort Worth
- Work background: Practiced family medicine in Georgetown for 24 years, started a rural track family medicine program for the University of Hawaii Medical School
- Date hired: August 2009
- Contact: 942-4250
- What is your main responsibility as chief medical officer?
- I am the liaison between the hospital administration and the medical staff here at the hospital. My other main responsibility is I am responsible for quality as it relates to the delivery of health care.
- What is rewarding about your job?
- I think the wonderful thing about this job is that I have the opportunity to move a few bigger stones than I could when I was I in private practice. The thing I love about this job is that I have come home [from Hawaii to Georgetown] to work with physicians and hospital staff that I worked with in a different context for the first 25 years of my career.
- What is the hospital’s greatest challenge?
- We’re a small hospital, and small hospitals have their own issues. The hardest thing is going to be responding to the growth in the community and the need for health care while continuing to provide the kind of health care that, as a community hospital, we have always provided.
- What misconception does the community have about the hospital?
- This hospital began 40 to 50 years ago in two or three rooms in what is now a house. Obviously, the hospital has grown, the delivery of medical care has changed and our ability to provide services has changed. The struggle for all community hospitals is there are people who still see the hospital as what it was years ago—as a small community hospital. That’s good because we can provide personal care, but we have been able to avail ourselves of resources we never had as a community hospital. That has helped us up our game significantly.
- What makes St. David’s Georgetown Hospital unique?
- We have the perfect combination of big hospital and small hospital. We have the ability to give people 95 percent of the health care they need and deliver it as neighbors helping neighbors. I delivered babies for a number of years before I started this job. I was on my second generation, delivering [babies of] women who I had delivered. There are nurses who have been there long enough that they remember delivering those babies. That’s the kind of personal care you just can’t get at a big hospital.
- What is something people don’t know about the hospital?
- People don’t know the level of commitment this hospital staff has to the hospital and to their patients. They don’t realize that these are people who have decided this is their life’s work and they want to come here and work hard to take care of their community. They also don’t understand how far this hospital has come in the past years in terms of meeting needs as this community grows and the level of care they will get here because of that.
