The big white tent set up outside the front door of the University of New Mexico Sandoval Regional Medical Center (SRMC) for its July 2012 ribbon-cutting was needed to shield guests from the blazing sun.
“I do remember it was quite warm,” recalls Candra Phillips, SRMC’s administrator of Ambulatory and Ancillary Services, who was one of the first people hired to staff the new hospital. “It was a lot of fun, and it’s still fun here, because we’re trailblazers.”
This Friday, SRMC will host its 10th anniversary celebration with a picnic-style event for staff, community members and UNM leadership.
President and CEO Jamie Silva-Steele will be joined by UNM president Garnett Stokes, Douglas Ziedonis, MD, MPH, executive vice president for Health Sciences and CEO of the UNM Health System, Rio Rancho Mayor Gregg Hull, Sandoval County Commissioner Michael Meek, and Jerry Schalow, CEO of the Rio Rancho Regional Chamber of Commerce.
President and CEO Jamie Silva-Steele will be joined by UNM president Garnett Stokes, Douglas Ziedonis, MD, MPH, executive vice president for Health Sciences and CEO of the UNM Health System, Rio Rancho Mayor Gregg Hull, Sandoval County Commissioner Michael Meek, and Jerry Schalow, CEO of the Rio Rancho Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Over the past decade 60-bed community hospital in Rio Rancho’s City Center, has grown to include a Level III trauma center and cutting-edge orthopedic and bariatric surgery specialties, as well as a behavioral health clinic and a robust suite of outpatient services. With more than 600 employees, it has repeatedly been voted the Best Place to Work in New Mexico, among many other accolades.
Matthew Wilks, MD, SRMC’s chief medical officer and chief quality officer, was also there at the beginning.
“It’s an amazing thing to be here at the 10th anniversary,” Wilks says. “I was recruited to come here to the emergency department in the spring of 2012 because my career prior to coming here was all in community emergency medicine.”
Wilks, who grew up in Arizona, was working in upstate New York when the SRMC position was created.
“I saw so much potential here, which was great,” he says. “The area was growing at the time and is still growing. The staff here was young and energetic and I saw this bright future. There have been some ups and downs along the way, but SRMC is really on its way to being a great community hospital and a great partner to this community.”
It took some time for the community to discover the new hospital in its midst, Wilks says. In the first half year of its operation SRMC’s emergency department saw 3,000 patients. “The next year it was 13,000,” he says. “We’re now around 22,000 patients a year.”
Although the majority of the physicians practicing at SRMC are members of the UNM School of Medicine faculty, a growing number are community physicians who are not affiliated with the university, he says.
SRMC’s location in southern Sandoval County, close to a number of pueblos, means that may of its patients are Native Americans, he says. “The goal when this hospital opened was really to be a community partner and meet the needs of this rapidly growing area and meet the needs of all of Sandoval County, which is a large county that extends significantly north from here.”
Pam Demarest, RN, MSN, MBA, is SRMC’s chief operating officer and chief nursing officer. She moved to SRMC in 2014 from UNM Hospital when Silva-Steele was recruiting.
Demarest is proud that amid the intense challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic SRMC was able to build and launch the UNM Center of Excellence for Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation, located next door to the hospital.
“We were continuing to do business as usual while we were seeing a higher volume of patients,” Demarest says. At the height of the second wave of COVID infections “some days we would be 8o percent full with COVID-positive patients,” she says. “For a facility with just 60 beds, that’s really remarkable.”
Demarest says the guiding management philosophy empowers everyone on the staff to participate in decision making. “All of our staff are problem solvers,” she says. “It’s not up to one person to come up with ‘this is how we should do this.’ The results are reflected in high levels of patient satisfaction and award recognition.
We hire for behaviors, because we know we can teach skills, but you can’t teach people how to behave. I think that’s really what makes us different than any other hospital
“I think it’s one of the best places to work because of the culture that we have here,” she says. “We hire for behaviors, because we know we can teach skills, but you can’t teach people how to behave. I think that’s really what makes us different than any other hospital.”
Phillips, who lives west of the hospital, remembers driving by the construction site on her way to her previous job. “I’d pass it every day on my way to downtown Albuquerque, saying, ‘I want to work there,’” she says. When a colleague recruited her to apply at SRMC she jumped at the chance.
She started out overseeing SRMC’s outpatient clinics and added a number of other areas to her portfolio through the years. She also played a key part in helping to lead the hospital’s emergency operations center, activated at the start of the COVID pandemic. “It was actually an amazing learning experience,” she says. “It lasted so long. We all got a lot of experience diving deep into each of those roles.”
After a decade on the job, Phillips says she still looks forward to coming to work each day.
“I think I’m most proud of the fact that as we’ve grown we’ve stayed very aligned,” she says. “And we ‘ve been able to do it in a way that’s purposeful, even if it’s not 100 percent structured. It feels like an amazing feat to me to be able to do this. We’ve done it really well, from my perspective.”
