St. Joseph’s names Women and Children’s Service Line leaders

SYRACUSE  —  St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center has named an administrator and medical director for its Women and Children’s Service Line, cementing a new organizational structure it has been using for much of the last year. 

“We’re structuring how we deliver care,” says Gael Gilbert, director of Maternal Child and Inpatient Psychiatric Services at St. Joseph’s and the administrator of its Women and Children’s Service Line. “We’re hopefully making it more efficient, more patient friendly, more staff friendly, and more provider friendly.”

The service line encompasses the hospital’s labor and delivery section, intensive-care nursery, postpartum mother-baby area, low-risk birthplace area, women’s medical surgical unit, and primary-care areas. More than 150 staff members work in the line’s areas. The idea is to bring people together from different units to help improve aspects like safety and efficiency.

The main service-line committee is made up of about 15 people and meets on a monthly basis. It also has subcommittees to work on specific issues, and it calls in ad-hoc members to help with certain focus areas, such as purchasing or marketing.

Service-line committee members aren’t all department heads, according to Dr. James Brown, who was named the line’s medical director.

“A lot of times you’ll have managers and their higher-up chairmen making decisions, but you won’t have the everyday people that are working on the front lines and can recognize that you can’t do something this way because of an issue,” he says. “So, now we have the frontline people being a part of the process. They can tell us what will work because they’re living it every day.”

For example, the hospital’s new emergency room is not close to its labor and delivery unit, Brown says. And while most mothers-to-be enter the hospital through its main entrance, a few go through the emergency room.

Employees at the main entrance know how to take a mother to the labor and delivery unit smoothly, according to Brown. But the Women and Children’s Service Line has been working to help the hospital’s emergency-room staff — its nurses and physicians — move soon-to-be mothers safely and efficiently, he says.

“Those are examples you find throughout the network,” Gilbert says. “We’re the experts in women’s and children’s [health care]. We want to make sure we’re working with other areas.”

The Women and Children’s Service Line is the fourth service line at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center. St. Joseph’s also has cardiac, orthopedic, and behavioral-health service lines. The first of those lines, cardiac and behavioral health, were informally established in 2005 and then set up formally in 2008.

St. Joseph’s Women and Children’s Service Line has reduced costs and improved efficiency, Gilbert says. But, she declined to share specific data because she says it is competitive information.

In trips around the country, Brown has seen other hospitals implementing service lines, he says. Hospitals typically start with orthopedics and cardiac surgery, although some, such as Rochester General Hospital, also have women and children’s service lines, he adds.

As St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center’s Women and Children’s Service Line administrator and medical director, respectively, Gilbert and Brown communicate with each other daily and meet weekly.

“Theoretically, every single person who works at St. Joseph’s is impacted by this,” Gilbert says. “Services for women and children touches every single department in the hospital, whether it be radiology, whether it be admitting, whether it be marketing.”

St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center is a nonprofit hospital with 431 beds and a health-care network that serves patients from Onondaga County and 15 surrounding counties. It is affiliated with Franciscan Companies and sponsored by the Sisters of St. Francis.