Josh Neff says he’s planning to stick around Durango for a while.
“I'm in Fort Morgan, I don't have this view,” the newly appointed CEO of CommonSpirit Mercy Hospital said, sitting in a C-Suite office Thursday gazing toward the La Plata Mountains, just hours after arriving in Durango.
Over the course of just a few weeks, current CEO Brandon Mencini announced he was starting a new job in Oregon in July and CommonSpirit announced that Neff would take over when Mencini leaves Monday.
Neff’s predecessors each held the position for just under two years.
Although Mencini was able to quickly insert himself into the community, forging key partnerships and involving himself with the business community, the whiplash of multiple turnovers in the CEO’s office can be hard on a community, Neff acknowledged.
It’s one of the downsides of being a high-achieving executive in a hospital system – leadership often whisks those people off to bigger and better things. Mencini is leaving Mercy now so that doesn’t happen in a few years, when his children are in the middle of high school, he said.
With new leadership at a regional level, Neff hopes to be in Southwest Colorado for good.
“I have wanted to be down here for a number of years, and I'm at a place in my career where I want to make sure that I'm building my own personal legacy,” Neff said. “And, I'm at a place where I want to put down some roots.”
A Texan by birth (he asks that it not be held against him) and a former critical care flight paramedic, Neff comes to the job from Fort Morgan, where he served as CEO of St. Elizabeth Hospital. He is also CommonSpirit’s Vice President of Integration and Rural Health.
If Mencini’s chapter in the Mercy history books was all about the immediate post-COVID-19 rebound, Neff says his is about navigating the unknown and maintaining consistency.
“People are accessing care differently today post-COVID than they were pre-COVID,” he said. “And so I think we've got to be diligent about connecting with the community to understand what their needs are and how we as an organization figure out how to address those needs.”
That’s a goal for the hospital as a whole, he said, as well as for him personally.
Neff describes himself as a people person, a point that bore worth repeating several times. Those relationships that will inform how the hospital adapts to new patients’ demands will not be made in his office, Neff insists. Rather, it is lunches at the nurses’ station that produce something authentic.
“We want to become a regional resource for care,” he said. “When you're a resource for care, that doesn't necessarily mean that you actually provide the care but you take part in either connecting people to care, or helping those folks who are specialists in … a particular kind of service line do well and create care pathways.”
That mindset could be one of the ways that the hospital navigates the issue of tubal ligations, Neff seemed to indicate.
In April 2023, the Catholic hospital system that owns Mercy decided to stop performing the procedure, known as getting one’s tubes tied, that prevents unwanted pregnancies at the time of cesarean sections. The move has been unpopular with many physicians and patients.
Neff said that decision was not made locally.
“We want to be able to provide avenues for folks to seek and receive the care that they want to be able to make the choice for themselves,” he said. “We may not be able to provide all of that, but we can certainly provide some connectivity and make sure that we're working with our partners across the region so that folks can do that.”
As the needs of the medical workforce adapts to change alongside the demands of patients, Neff sees authentic connection as the way forward.
“For me, being a true, mask-free authentic and transparent leader has been the secret sauce,” he said.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
