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JEAN OWENS
Retired Director of Nursing Services - PCMH

March 30, 2000

Interviewer: Beth Nelson/Sally Lucido

Beth Nelson: I would like you to start off by giving me a little bit of information about your background.

Jean Owens: I was born in Pitt County. I am a Pitt County person, dyed in the wool I'll tell you. I went to school in Pitt County and got my BS Degree over at East Carolina University. I was at Rex Hospital in the capacity of Supervisor in the Emergency Room for about seven years and then I was Evening Supervisor at the same place. Then I decided to go back to school, mainly because I had been out of school quite a few years and I was in debt that many hundreds of dollars so I felt I was not getting anywhere. So, I went back to East Carolina University. While I was there the Administrator of when Wake Memorial Hospital called and wanted to know if I would come and talk to him. They offered me a job when I got out of school and I went to work there and was there for seven years. Let me tell you one thing, this is about Wake Memorial but its pretty typical of all hospitals, I got there about one and one-half years after they had opened and they had already gone through three Directors of Nursing that seems to be the history of all hospitals. While I was there we bought this lot down here in Washington and I wanted to live down here someday. I didn't have any set date but when I heard about the position at Pitt Memorial being available then I got in touch with them and as a result I went to work there later.

Sally Lucido: Also, don't forget to mention your years in the Service.

Jean Owens: Oh yes, I was in the Army for a couple of years overseas in Korea and Japan. Lovely experience!

Beth Nelson: You came to Pitt Memorial in what year and what was your first title?

Jean Owens: I came to Pitt Memorial in 1970 as Director of Nursing.

Beth Nelson: You were there until what year?

Jean Owens: 1983.

Beth Nelson: I guess the desire to come to Pitt County was probably a more personal one. Did you have family in Pitt County?

Jean Owens: No, I just wanted to get on the water at that time, and now at this time I just want to get off the water.

Beth Nelson: I guess the flood had that effect on you?

Jean Owens: Did it ever! It really dropped the property values down here. That's frightening! That's why everyone down here, just about, is raising their house. I can't afford it unless they will give me a job back at Pitt Memorial. I hear they are short of nurses. I don't even have a nursing license anymore. The minute I left over there I let my license go. I guess I couldn't help you out.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk a little bit about looking back over the years, the years that you were there, plus the years since then. Talk a little bit about what you think the hospital has meant to Greenville and Pitt County and eastern North Carolina.

Jean Owens: It has meant everything under the sun to them to get a facility like what is there now. I can't say that for the first one when I went there. I don't think that was any great advantage or that wasn't a plus. But now, East Carolina University and Pitt County Memorial Hospital as far as I'm concerned are the things that have caused the traffic jams in Greenville! I was over there the other day and I swore I was never coming back.

Beth Nelson: Can you think of some events, some particular challenges that came up in the course of your work there?

Jean Owens: One thing that came up immediately was the fact that I had no nurses practically. At that time, I forget how many beds were there at the hospital, I guess around 200 and some, When I first went there we had fifty nurses, I mean fifty-one nurses including myself, on the staff. Thirty of those nurses were in the operating room and recovery room so you can see that left just about nobody to cover a hospital twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The first thing I had to go to work on real fast-there were really two things. One was to recruit nurses if that were possible. I think we did a very good job of that over the next few years. The other route to take was to get all duties and responsibilities out of the Department of Nursing that belonged somewhere else.

I will give you an example. The nurses after 5 p.m. had to go into the Pharmacy and work. They had to haul patients down to the Xray Department and the Lab. In other words, they were doing everything after the others went home, more or less and I had to get those duties off of them so that they could spend what little time we did have in the Department of Nursing.

I was standing out by the elevator one day just looking and all I saw was nursing personnel running up and down the hall going here and going there and I thought what in the world are we doing. We got a lot of those off by shifting the responsibilities back to the departments that took care of them from 8-5 and we also gave them that responsibility from 3-11 and even 11-7. I believe all the departments are open for 24 hours.

Beth Nelson: I would imagine that that would have been a controversial move because it seems like all of those departments had been dependent on Nursing. How was that handled?

Jean Owens: Just by being ornery and saying that we were not going to do it anymore. One of my nurses called me at home one night from the Surgical Intensive Care Unit and told me she was having problems with the Xray Department since I had told her not to leave this area. She said she had not left the Unit to take anybody to Xray and they won't come and get them and she asked me what she should tell them. I told her to tell them that she was not going to take the patients down there, period, that's just it. She had only four patients but they were all critically ill and they wanted her to come down there and spend the time with the patient. When you refuse to do something like this you're getting everyone else on your back and it was not a very popular kind of situation and some of them were in my own Department that we had to switch around. We had a Department called Central Service and they didn't do anything so we decided they would have a lot of fun if they delivered to the nurses instead of the nurses coming down to get the supplies from them. They sat there for eight hours a day and really did nothing while the nursing personnel were trotting back and forth. We changed that around real fast. We set up a delivery service and I think they finally went to using a bicycle. That little effort was the first delivery service in the hospital, I guess, hut it worked very well after everybody sort of fell into it.

Beth Nelson: How was it you were able to come to see how things should be done? Was it your experience in Raleigh that made you realize that the change was needed?

Jean Owens: Yes, actually it was a National thing to some degree because nurses screamed about it all the time. Mainly it was through experience at Wake Memorial that did it because the same situations existed there. The pharmacists went home at 5:00 p.m. and that was it. The nurses then had to man the pharmacy. Yes, a lot of it was identical to Wake and all you had to do was stand out in the corridor at Pitt for awhile and see who was going where and why but we got it changed around. At least it got changed around.

I'll tell you another funny thing that happened to me was that Buck Sitterson and I were very good friends, I think, and he and I had a different slant on things. I went into his office one day and I told him to please take a tour with me. I wanted to show him a few things and he very nicely went with me and went up on one of the nursing units.That's when patients were out in the hall. Electrical cords to the machinery were strung all over the floors. It was just a mess. I'll admit Pitt Memorial was way behind times in getting fire prevention and fire safety. I took him down on one of the stairways where the hoses were and I told him to look and I reached up and touched it and it completely fell apart. It was totally rotten. Anyway, it was what they would have used had there been a fire in there but it never got used, thank goodness. We finally got the Fire Department to come over and really look around and tell us what we needed. At Wake I had been used to the fact that the Fire Department came over at least once a month on every shift and put us through a fire drill and I mean they put us through one too. I don't think Pitt had ever had one and I think the Fire Department had dropped the ball somewhere along the way. When you are talking about one of the most important places in the city if you had to evacuate, this was absolutely important.

Beth Nelson: What year would that have been? Was that in the early 1970's?

Jean Owens: Yes, the early 1970's. It wasn't too long before I started getting in trouble with everybody and I guess I stayed in trouble. When I left in 1983 I went into retirement.

One of the greatest things that happened to me there or anywhere else was my experience with the move from the old hospital to the new one. We had the greatest team of people working that you have ever seen. Buck Sitterson was one of them. He and I had to work pretty closely together because I was in charge of patient moves and he was in charge of equipment moves and we really had to coordinate this stuff. We didn't want to take a patient to the new hospital and not have anything in that hospital and on the other hand we could not leave them at the old hospital with nothing. Buck was absolutely great to work with.

Beth Nelson: What about Ralph Hall? There were so many things that were going on that were technology related. How did all that go?

Jean Owens: I don't think we had any during the actual move. We did get nursing tested because we had a code blue just prior to leaving the old hospital and a code blue (same person) after we got to the new hospital and the system got tested real fast when you had an emergency like that but everything went fine.

Sally Lucido: Jean, why don't you speak to how some of the patients were moved from the old into the new hospital. I especially remember a moving van or truck, am I right?

Jean Owens: We had a special truck, van or whatever, to move the critical patients, the ones who were in lots of traction and could not be taken out. The only problem I had was with the gentleman that was in charge of transportation vehicles. He certainly told me what they had and it did not fit where we were going to back the truck up to. I told him we had to have a ramp built to go smoothly up there. He said he couldn't do that and I asked him to try. I said for him to try real hard and he did try hard and he did it. We moved all of the critical care patients out one separate door because we moved many of them in their beds and the others were moved by the ambulances there in town and they helped us out greatly. For those patients, it was quite a challenge to get them out and moved without doing them in.

Beth Nelson: How many patients did you move?

Jean Owens: I think right about 100, which is counting the newborn babies. One of the cutest things that happened during that time was that the student nurses from East Carolina helped us and they moved the newborns. The elevator would open and here were a bunch of student nurses called "bluebirds" who came out and every one of them had a baby in their arms and they moved them over to the new hospital. We didn't move them in cribs or anything. They were all carried over and the students enjoyed it and we enjoyed it.

We had told the doctors that at 7:00 a.m. on this day we will start the move so either they were to make rounds before that or don't come back during that time. Anyway, we got through that absolutely beautifully. We tried to get the doctors not to admit patients during that twenty-four hours unless it was an emergency. I stayed over there all night in the old hospital to direct the patient move out of there and my assistant was over in the new hospital greeting the patients. We had already assigned rooms and Helen Abbott was getting them in place in the new hospital. All night long the doctors were admitting patients just as hard as they could. We had to, of course, update everything for the Dietary Department so they could feed them.

Jean Owens: We had already made up a list of patients on every unit in the new hospital so we had to assign them in the old hospital and give them a bed and give them a new room over in the new hospital and get them on all the lists so that they could get fed and get their blood work and xrays and everything else. That was the one thing that really bombed us out was the admissions during that time but I don't remember having any fatalities as we did great.

Sally Lucido: Did any of this affect the Billing Department with additional charges, etc?

Jean Owens: I really don't know. You start out in one place that is falling apart and wake up in a beautiful new hospital. It was a rat race trying to keep up with the admissions but I think we did well. Nobody screamed and yelled and carried on. It went just so beautifully. I couldn't imagine that myself. The move was on April 30, 1977.

Beth Nelson: You were probably very involved in getting the bond issue passed and some of those kinds of things.

Jean Owens: I really wasn't that involved. I hadn't been there too long when it was all going on. I knew it was going to pass.

Beth Nelson: It only passed by twelve votes. It's amazing that you would know that.

Jean Owens: Yes, it was a tight one. Greenville had to go that way. There was just no other way and they had to get out of that building they were in and build them a Medical Center over there. They just had to. The thing that I was very leery about and did not want to be a part of was the Medical School because I am not a Medical School nurse and I had never in any of my experiences worked in one and I simply did not want to be involved and suddenly here I was in the middle of one.

Beth Nelson: So, you came to Greenville not knowing that it was going to be? I'm sure it had been talked about at the point that you came but probably not to the extent that it was really happening.

Jean Owens: I really didn't know it was going to happen. I felt that the new hospital really would come into being but not so much the Medical School. I did not want to be a part of the Medical School.

Beth Nelson: What was your reason? Was it because of the academic environment?

Jean Owens: I think the patients sort of get lost in the shuffle when you have that many people taking care of them. My only experience up until then was in Durham at the Veterans Hospital. I worked there for two months so you can see how well I liked that. The Duke residents were over there and I had no pleasant experience at all with it. None, I mean none and so I didn't really want it to tell you the truth. I didn't want the Medical School but I certainly didn't stand in its way. I couldn't, let's face it.

Beth Nelson: You survived under that environment. Tell me about the Affiliation Agreement would have been struck in about 1975 or so and it was late 1970 when the first class came and so you were there during those years. Your fears about patients getting caught in the shuffle and your concerns about dealing with an academic environment, did it turn out better than you expected, worse or what?

Jean Owens: Much better than I expected. The chiefs of the services were then Medical School and they were great to work with. They were completely different from a private physician. Anesthesia and Radiology were the exceptions as they were private physicians. The greatest problem at that time that I saw was, as an example. I went to the Delivery Room one day, making rounds, and they were hammering and sawing and doing everything. I asked the nurse what was going on in here and she said they were building an Intensive Care Unit with two beds. And I asked again what they were doing and who was going to staff it. I mean, after all, it was one of my departments and I didn't even know they were building it. The medical school had decided we needed one. Trying to keep things together as to what they were doing and what I had to do to support that was a little bit of a problem at times. In fact, it was real often.

Beth Nelson: I guess the thing that you had to contend with was the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing and that was a real problem.

Jean Owens: It always is. I finally talked Jack Richardson in to letting us have a weekly meeting with the Chiefs of the Services and for the first one it was wonderful. They all made it to the meeting. After that, one or two might have come in and that was it. It didn't last any time at all. Their schedules were too busy and they could not add something else in there. That was a big, big problem.

Beth Nelson: How did you overcome that? How did you deal with it?

Jean Owens: Well, I threatened suicide every night! No, I just sat and took it and I would make rounds real often to see if I could find out what was going on and who was doing what and we had a nursing meeting at least every month for them to brief me and for me to try to brief them if I knew what was going on. That kind of thing will forever be a problem.

Beth Nelson: Had there been a director of nursing prior to yourself?

Jean Owens: Oh yes, for quite awhile. Her name was Phyllis Martin. I think she had been there for a good long time but she was gone when I got there. Helen Abbott was filling in until I got there.

Beth Nelson: It seems to me like there had been a lot of turnover in that position in a lot of other hospitals but you survived for thirteen years there. Why do you think that was?

Jean Owens: Because I could out run them. When you're getting shot at you feel like you're running through a minefield. I got so used to it that it was really funny, I mean in a way it was funny. One day I remember, I think it was Buck Sitterson or Rick Gilstrap one, who asked me who I was running from today. I'll tell you something else as far as Administration was concerned and certainly the Medical Staff, they have power and rightly it should be. If I wanted something done or not done, I knew I couldn't get there myself if the Medical Staff was on the other side, so I had a friend on the Medical Staff and I would go to him and I would tell him that something was happening that I didn't want to happen and he told me to never fear that it won't happen. He would call Jack and tell him not to do it and it never got done. What they were doing at the time, the Medical Staff was under the gun in that they didn't have enough room as nobody did. Just like the parking lots that you never have enough of. Some of the rooms that we had designated when the hospital was designed were for nursing and nursing only, and they started using them for something else. One thing I remember so well is that I went up on one of our units one day and I looked in one of my conference rooms and the dietician was in there just writing up something and I asked her what she was doing there and she told me it was now her office. I don't know who gave this to her or anything else but it was suddenly her office. So, we lost a conference room but everybody was fighting for space. I'm sure they still are and you couldn't build enough it was growing so fast.

Sally Lucido: I remember Rick Gilstrap used to say if you are going to build a new hospital, build another new one right beside it or across the street and then you might be ahead.

Jean Owens: That's about it too. I have often asked myself where have all the cars come from because one day there is no parking lot here and the next day you go by and it is open and it is completely filled. Now where were those cars the day before? Where did they come from? You cannot build enough parking places out there.

Beth Nelson: Looking at things like living through the Affiliation Agreement and s seeing people team up and develop alliances there that had not been before. Do you remember any of that which you were a part of?

Jean Owens: One of the things that I was the proudest of over there, nothing to do with the medical school because it started a little bit before they did, was that we had to recruit some more nurses which we needed. I went through channels. I asked Jack about it in a memo as far as getting Pitt Community College to start a program. East Carolina was doing great and we recruited some of their nurses but it just wasn't enough. So, we got a nursing program started out at Pitt Community College and it has saved the lives over there. Those nurses are everywhere. We recruited almost 100% of those nurses. I think we also went to Canada during that time to recruit nurses and I saw not long ago in the paper where the hospital had gone to the Philippines. They will probably have more trouble with that than we did with the Canadians because at least the Canadians could speak English.

Beth Nelson: You were probably one of the first to move toward recruiting other nationalities.

Jean Owens: Yes, I was. You needed to recruit wherever you could get them in those days. We had to because we knew what was coming and we knew what we had and I think we did well at East Carolina University. I don't know what percentage of their nurses we recruited but there were quite a few. In those days it was in an old beat up building, a county hospital which was not really that fascinating and we were trying to recruit the BS nurse and we just didn't get as many as we wanted. I'm sure it is not that difficult now. One of the greatest drawing points to recruit nurses was not the ability of the Director of Nursing. It was how many residents were running around that weren't married! I left in 1983 so I don't really know what has happened since then except it is growing and growing.

Beth Nelson: What about things like big critical events that really stressed the system? I remember when we had the tornadoes and had about 150 people go through the ED in a span of about three hours that night and we had trouble getting staff in because the roads were blocked. Do you remember any watershed events like that?

Jean Owens: We had the snow in 1980. I couldn't get to work and we had trouble getting the staff in. We were trying to get everybody we could with 4-wheel drive vehicles to get the nurses in but once they got there, they stayed. Spent several nights in the hospital, slept and got up and worked the next shift. That was the only one I went through over at the hospital.

Sally Lucido: If I remember right, they had a skeleton crew, I couldn't get in but my daughter was working part time in Medical Records and she didn't get home for three days. She was in high school then and they put her to work in several areas of the hospital. Jack Richardson, who at the time lived in Cherry Oaks, hitched a ride on a snowplow to get to the hospital all the way across town. Those of us who were not already at work couldn't get in for several days.

Jean Owens: I have been through a couple of good snows but not at Pitt Memorial. The worse one I ever got into was at Wake Memorial. I didn't get into work myself over at Pitt so I couldn't have been too involved but they had a hard time. Tornadoes, snow and floods, they are something else in a hospital.

Beth Nelson: Whom do you credit for the hospital's success?

Jean Owens: Just a lot of dedicated interested people. Those people who really wanted that Medical School and that Hospital. A lot of dedicated people who wanted something better than what they had and they have of got it now.

Sally Lucido: Are there any board members who you thought had great input into that who made a lot of things happen? Can you remember any one in particular who made such an impact since you went to all the Board meetings?

Jean Owens: Did I ever! I really can't remember that far back. That was my first experience in going to board meetings. At Rex and Wake they didn't let Nursing get close to board meetings. Jack Richardson believed in Nursing being there.

Beth Nelson: It seems to me that you would have been a logical person to be there.

Sally Lucido: At that time they had a small Administrative Staff. Now, I think one of the reasons for not all the Administrative Staff going is so that board members will not feel intimidated and overrun by the Staff. They really don't like a lot of extra people in the room. Key people go every month of which Nursing is one, and the remainder of the Staff go on an "as needed" basis.

Jean Owens: I remember the first board meeting I ever went to, I really couldn't believe it because I had come from a place that had some very nice fringe benefits and at that time they had no fringe benefits for employees at Pitt . I don't think they even had health insurance. You got a week vacation or something like that and a couple of holidays but they were sitting in there that night talking about employees wanting more vacation and one of the board members said they didn't deserve any more vacation and one week was enough for anybody. He had no concept.

Sally Lucido: Jean, can you remember any funny or interesting facts when they built the West Bed Tower since our office was about 20 feet from there?

Jean Owens: My heavens, all I could do was look out and see the bed tower going up. When I first went in my office over there I had weeds coming up in there and for awhile we lived with that kind of stuff. When we were still in the old hospital, Mr. Richardson made all of us visit the new hospital about once a week and just walk around and see what changes needed to be done. He wanted us to carry a clipboard and make a list of the little things that maybe Mr. Hall, as the engineer had not spotted. We went and I went back with a long list of things and started marking them off. I remember one thing that maybe was a minor detail to Ralph Hall, every bathroom in that facility had no place for towels. There wasn't a towel rack in that hospital. Another thing that was so funny was that somebody was bringing in a stretcher and they could not get the stretcher into the bathroom, the patient's bathroom, there was one on every floor for the rooms that did not have baths, you couldn't get a stretcher or wheelchair into them. In fact we couldn't get in there without jumping over the tub. It was just a horrible design. One of the fellows down in Purchasing said he wanted to show me something and in their bathroom in that Department, you had to go, stand up on the commode, close the door and then you could use the commode.

Sally Lucido: What I was actually referring to was when they built the West Bed Tower, after we were already in there and if you remember your office was just a few feet from there. Remember when they dug up the beautiful courtyard?

Jean Owens: Yes, I do remember. You know, every time you get something over there that you like they removed it and that is the history of the hospital.

Sally Lucido: Remember when the gypsy family was there and they washed their clothes in the outdoor fountains. There were probably approximately 50 or so family or otherwise at any given time.

Beth Nelson: Yes, I remember the gypsy family being there and they would go out, apparently they had all kinds of problems with hygiene, and they had to set aside one entire waiting room to accommodate those gypsies because they offended everybody else with their body odor. They would take their clothes and wash them in the fountains. I came at the end of 1983 and you left in June of 1983. You were Director of Nursing and then you went to Admissions didn't you? What was your title in Admissions?

Jean Owens: I was Director of Admissions. When Sally Lucido first came to Pitt I decided I would do her a favor and I went downtown and bought her a dictionary. It was a "Dictionary for Yankees and Other Uneducated People." She was the first Yankee we ever let in the hospital! They shut the door after she came in.

Beth Nelson: Let's talk a little bit about the changes that you have seen in Nursing over the years at Pitt.

Jean Owens: Well, there were so many and so fast I am not sure. One thing we had to do pretty quickly was in our orientation for nurses. I called Dot Fisher in Education one day and told her that I wanted every nurse who went through our orientation to be certified in CPR because I think that everybody who works on a nursing unit should be certified in CPR. I think she accomplished that. We had trouble getting enough certified CPR instructors to teach the class but tried to get them involved in that because nurses were never involved too much in that as they were not trained well enough to take care of an emergency situation. They are now, I'm sure.

Beth Nelson: Yes, because CPR was not something that was required of nurses? I think that is interesting.

Jean Owens: I think the students get it now but Dot Fisher almost died when I told her I wanted every nurse going through orientation to be certified in CPR.

Beth Nelson: Were you unusual among Directors of Nursing in pushing for that?

Jean Owens: I think so. I had never come up against it before, but now, as I say, I think it is included in the nursing curriculum in most of the schools. The equipment also improved greatly. In other words, we got money that we didn't have before.

Sally Lucido: Wouldn't you say that much of this is attributed to the Medical School?

Jean Owens: Yes, I'm sure it was. I think the nursing relationship with other departments in the hospital has changed considerably. You know as far as the work is concerned and the ideas of what are nursing. You have a problem telling anybody what is nursing. The nurses have problems knowing who their boss is. There really is no way to tell who your boss is, whether it's the Director of Nursing, the Board of Nursing in Raleigh, or the Administrator of the hospital or the medical staff because 99% of what a nurse does during the day is strictly by orders of the medical staff. I can see where they might see them as their boss. We had problems with that sometimes but I think the equipment and the relationship of nursing to the other departments was the greatest thing that we went through over there. That experiment that you tried over there went even further which I think was Work Redesign.

Beth Nelson: The goal there I think was to reduce the number of staff having interaction with patients. They did some studies that indicated something like a typical patient experiences over 100 staff in the course of the typical stay and they wanted to reduce that number. I guess they developed a relationship with a hand full of people rather than no relationship with 100.

Sally Lucido: I was told many times that the nurses found it very hard with their extra duties.

Beth Nelson: Yes, it was very controversial. A lot of their duties were not their typical nursing duties and a lot of them perceived them as being beneath what they were trained for, particularly those who had specialized advanced degrees and all.

Sally Lucido: On the other hand, think of what we were paying them for doing housekeeping work in a patient room. It had its good and bad points, I guess, and I heard it from both sides working where I did.

Beth Nelson: Whatever happened with all that. They changed some of the titles and they became Care Partners, more generic names as opposed to like nurses, physical therapists and that kind of thing.

Jean Owens: To give you a good example of how nursing was viewed by everybody and certainly the medical staff back in those days-we had an occupational therapist, only one working there. This was the first one we had ever had. I had never had any experience working with an occupational therapist. Anyway, I was up on one of the units one day and she told one of the doctors that she was going to be gone for a week because she had to go to a meeting and he told her not to worry about it, to just let the nurses do it. That is the way it was seen. Whatever somebody else didn't want to do or cannot do they just let the nurses do it. Her name was Donna Clark and she was the first OT. She came there with nothing to work with and no place to put it.

Jean Owens: The greatest thing that ever happened was the changing role of nurses as seen by other people. I was not there during any of this change of Care Partners; I had no idea of what they were doing there.

Beth Nelson: You are talking about the change in how nursing was perceived by other departments, I guess you would have kind of been in the vanguard of that because you were an advocate for nurses being able to nurse and not be distracted by other duties.

Jean Owens: I wouldn't have fit in well with that, I'm sure.

Beth Nelson: I have a list of the number of people that everyone seems to think were the true leaders in the development of the hospital over the years. These might be people you had heard of prior to your coming, people who were there in the years that you were there, people who have come since then who you have heard of through your contacts with the hospital. Name some people who you see as being the giants of the development of the hospital.

Jean Owens: I don't have any idea when I drive through over there in that area who is medical school or private practice. It is real confusing to me because I didn't grow up with that. When I think back, as far as the medical staff, I see Bill Laupus as one of the greatest. I think he was great to work with, he understood better than most and I think he probably drew the medical staff together more than anyone, I would think he did. Everybody respected him. Jack Allison did a lot for the Emergency Department. He worked closer with Betty Trought because she had an interest in that.

Beth Nelson: How about leaders from the standpoint of county commissioners who were supportive of the hospital or board of trustees members who you feel contributed greatly?

Jean Owens: When I think back on those days, I think it was Kenneth Dews and Wilton Duke. They were just great. I think Ed Warren was just great also..

Beth Nelson: What do you see as challenges for the future?

Jean Owens: Getting all those nurses recruited. I'll tell you, you grow so fast and it happens in most hospitals that they just don't have enough personnel to do the things that have to be done. I know Sally says the hospital gets great letters from patients talking about the care being so good and if they just keep on growing without some way of getting the nurses in there and the schools of nursing, both of them, they cannot expand too much. There comes a time when they can't take any more in their classes, not that they don't have the applicants. It's the fact that they don't have the clinical area in that one hospital to spread the students out to get the clinical experience they have to have. They have to limit the number and they have to work together very closely to be sure the students are spread out to get their clinical experience they need. One thing I always used to tell them was the hospital is open twenty-four hours a day. You could put students over at the hospital any time they wanted but they have to stick to their schedule which is classes so they were mostly wanting the morning hours - 8-3 - and they really have to work together. Evelyn Perry worked with Judy Kuykendall to work out a schedule so that the students would get enough clinical experience. They have to have a good source of nurses that's one thing. I don't see how they are going to get it there because they cannot expand the schools' of nursing. They have a good recruiting department at the hospital. You know, Helen Abbott was our first nurse recruiter. We didn't have a recruiter. We didn't have a budget for education or travel and we got that. That is an absolute must. You need to get a good source for nurses and get a recruiting department like you can't believe going.

Sally Lucido: I think the hospital has an excellent recruiting department right now. The people really know what they are doing. They are very professional in their field.

Beth Nelson: There is a real science to that.

Jean Owens: I had a hard time getting adjusted to or used to the billboard advertising. I did not want it.

Beth Nelson: Well, I was the person who did a lot of that. To be honest with you, I didn't like it either. I'm not a fan of billboard advertising for much of anything. I think it is an eyesore. I thought the other methods of advertising were a little more tolerable, but the problem I had was I felt like they were visual clutters. You think about how nice a road is when you ride along and you can just see greenery. Actually, it worked very well but it would not have been my choice. The other thing was, to me a billboard works if you are trying to tell somebody that a certain place is 2 miles down the road so when you have a simple message it works. Recruiting nurses is not a simple message. Especially when you have a name as long as ours is. To put that on a billboard is a very difficult thing but you could not convince Dave McRae not to put billboards up as he though that was fine. We have laughed about it many times but it did work. We turned around the nursing shortage a lot during that period. It was a number of things we did. We did one big thing which was funding the high schools programs for interesting children in health careers and try to encourage them to go to college after that. This program was proposed as a feeder for ECU and PCC, nursing and allied health programs. Dave had a lot of good ideas. I have to say that 90% of things for Dave, I have to say I agreed with him. About the only thing we diverged on was advertising on billboards.

Sally Lucido: I know one thing that everyone talks about and is proud of are the presentations on local television stations. These are about University Health Systems and the various centers of excellence. They make you think no matter how many times you see them. They are wonderful.

Jean Owens: I have seen them and agree but you are bound to have a good recruiting department because you had 50 some nurses when I went there and now you have many times that number. Somebody must be doing a good job to go from the original number when I first came to what they have now. This is a tough market out there. There are many hospitals out there trying to do the same thing. Any way you look at it regardless of how you see a nurse, you cannot run a hospital without them. You try everything but you just cannot do without nurses. In the complexity of the patients and what is going on over at Pitt just requires more. They have a rather large critical care unit there now too. When I was in the hospital over here, I got excellent care, but I asked one of the nurses one day when I was getting ready to come home, what was the ratio of nurse to patient in that unit and she said it was usually one on one or it could be two or three on one if you need that many. You can see how that eats up personnel when you are talking about one on one in that kind of unit and maybe one on twelve somewhere else and they have a lot of critical beds over at Pitt Memorial now.