Seeks to become a 'Healing Hospital'
For 10 years, Kelly Mather had a recurring dream. In it was a house with a view of the water.
So when she heard about the top administrative post opening at Sutter Lakeside Hospital two years ago, she visited Lakeport. During that visit, she found a lot near the hospital with a view of Clear Lake. Mather knew she had come to the right place.
It was an uncanny reality.
"We drove right to the lot and there was a 'for sale' sign on it. I knew I wanted to be here," said Mather, who had been Chief Executive Officer at San Leandro Hospital.
Now into her second year as Chief Executive Officer at Sutter Lakeside Hospital, Mather and her husband, Rick, are building their home on that lot. She is also turning one of her other dreams into the hospital mission.
"We are working on bringing wellness into the hospital setting," said Mather, the mother of three children, ages 7, 5 and 2. "My vision is to have a hospital that provides care and education to people outside the typical hospital setting, so that they don't end up in the hospital."
The vision of a Lake County wellness community and healing hospital that offers all types of medicine, not just acute care, became her mission.
"We want to have a top quality hospital so that if you do become a patient, you have a healing experience - from the environment to the treatment and care you receive from our staff," said Mather. "I envision our staff improving each patient's outlook and making sure each patient feels satisfied and has an opportunity to heal."
Mather envisions a healthy village on the campus, a place of healing gardens and walking trails, cozy home-like patient rooms, and top-quality acute care. In her vision are wellness and preventitive medicine programs to help people improve their health so they do not end up in the hospital.
And, most importantly, Mather said, is seeing patients as people, treating them as individuals and looking at the whole person, not just treating the physical ailment that may have brought them into the hospital.
"Many times in health care there is a tendency to refer to the patient by their condition, 'The gallbladder in room five', instead of 'Mrs. Smith in room five,'" said Aleta Walker, Sutter Lakeside's Chief Community Officer. "Our goal is to bring the humanity of each person back into the health care setting by remembering that we are all human beings, with thoughts, feelings and fears."
One of the main components of the hospital's 10 year strategic plan is inpatient care. Sutter Lakeside hopes to remodel its current inpatient structure to an "intake wing" and an "intake center", where instead of having patients travel to all the services, (admitting, xray, etc.) they would walk in the front door of the intake center and be met by a concierge who would escort them to their room. All the services would then come to the patient. "It helps alleviate stress and fear from the second they walk in the door," said Walker.
Mather wants Sutter Lakeside Hospital to be on of the top 100 hospitals among 2,800 in the country, meeting such nationally recognized indicators as mortality rates, length of stay, quality of patient care and profitability. "We are the third unhealthiest county in the state of California because the age of the population is older here than most communities in the state," said Mather. "There's a lot of data that shows there are reasons we are ill, but I still think people are making unhealthy choices or choosing maladaptive coping mechanisms to deal with stress in their lives." Sutter Lakeside will strive to help people understand why they choose "maladaptive mechanisms", or why they are getting sick. "For example, there are a lot of reasons people get breast cancer, but is there possibly suppressed anger that's causing the breast cancer? That's not for me to answer. It is an individual question which helps people find out what's truly going on with them," Mather said.
Mather's hope is that eventually - within three years, if she meets her goal, Sutter Lakeside Hospital will be known as Sutter Lakeside Healing Hospital.