HJNO Sep/Oct 2025

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  SEP / OCT 2025 11 and retaining the best people, and reward- ing our people. Editor With evolving healthcare regulations, workforce challenges, and technology innovation, what are your top priorities over the next five to 10 years? Stock There are a lot of different organizations measuring hospital performance, and we’ve consistently been one of the best. Evolving healthcare regulations and workforce challenges and technology that’s very expensive — all are top priorities for us over the next five to 10 years. Navigating the regulations that are con- stantly changing. They make it very difficult to plan ahead. We therefore try to develop an organization that adapts quickly. We have been successful in the workforce area and worked very hard at it. None of our nurses, for example, are contract nurses, which is kind of unheard of. It’s been that way for several years. We’ve acquired new, advanced technol- ogy along the way that is really great. New technology that’s high quality, safer, more efficient, faster, and delivers greater benefits to the patient. Balancing these priorities and others is challenging, but we’ve done it. Editor How is Thibodaux Regional preparing for increasing demands in areas like telehealth, behavioral health, aging services, or disaster readiness, especially given Louisiana’s unique geography and risks? Stock Preparing for these demands when you’re immersed in the healthcare system, you are constantly thinking about what are we going to be three years from now?What do we have to do today to prepare for that? Three years doesn’t sound like a long time, and the way things are, the speed at which change is occurring, that’s not a long time. But, healthcare, you know, I found that if you stay focused on the things that matter the most, all good things come from that. Do what’s right for the patient and do that consistently. Everybody pulling together sounds simple, but it’s actually pretty hard to do. You can achieve some things that nobody thought you could if you can be innovative. You can figure out in this fairly rural area what can we do here to improve the health of the people? You keep thinking about it, you’ll figure out a way to do it. Hospitals exist not just to take care of somebody in critical care, but also, getting upstream. Meaning, how can you affect the lives of people in a positive way to avoid them maybe someday being in that critical care unit, where, through lifestyle changes and attention to health and wellness, they definitely could avoid cancer and a number of ailments, underlying illnesses, and prob- lems that complicate care and people die from those things. So what can you do about that?We built a five-storyWellness Center that looks like it belongs in some big place. We have 350,000 visits to just the fitness center part of it every year, and that has grown. You just have to talk to people who use the fitness center to find it’s making a positive difference in their lives. There are increasing demands and we have to adjust, have to anticipate, we have to know when to act and when not to act. There’s a lot of high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, things like that, that are some of the worst rates in the country. What we’ve done is recruit doctors, and we’re very suc- cessful at it. We just recruited eight or nine. Editor Is there a moment, big or small, that made you most proud to be in this role? Stock You have to have all the components to really deliver care in the best manner possible. That includes things like process improvement, which we’ve been a leader in, Lean Toyota production methodology and Six Sigma originated by GE, and we’re pretty good at that and that allows us to deliver care in a better manner. That allows us to deliver care in a way that we achieve excellent results, both of the patient engagement and satisfaction category and clinical outcomes. I’ve been here for over 30 years, but one of the things that made me proud over time here is how we’ve been able to be here for the people in this area during hurricanes. These hurricanes are pretty serious business and devastating, as you know. They are very disruptive to everything, including health- care delivery. We remained open and func- tioning through all hurricanes, contrary to some other providers in the region. Most recently, Hurricane Ida, for example. We’ve taken on lots and lots of patients that otherwise would’ve had to leave here and go somewhere else. And have done a good job of it and I’m really proud of our staff and our doctors, of how they have worked together. Teamwork like you wouldn’t believe that continues through the thick of it is just amazing. Where you have hurricanes roll in too frequently, and you never know exactly what they’re going to do, how things are going to work, but you know at the end of the day you can look back and say, “Man, I’m proud of these people. They really did an amazing job.” Editor When you’re not running a health system, where do you go to recharge? Stock The ability to recharge yourself, I think, is partly learning about yourself. That’s just my personal opinion. I know that I can work six or eight months pretty hard and then I need a little bit of change, something that changes that heavy, heavy load. Another way to recharge yourself is to unload those things you don’t have control over. There’s a lot of those things in our busi- ness that we, I, don’t control. It doesn’t mean I don’t do anything about them, but I have to recognize it. It’s very difficult for me to take on every single thing, and so unloading