Planning, Leading MOTIVATES BOARD MEMBER LINDSAY

BY DWAIN HEBDA | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES MOORE

LIKE ALL MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS, DR. JASON LINDSAY PUTS IN SOME FULL DAYS AS A PHYSICIAN AT MOUNTAIN HOME UROLOGY, A PRACTICE HE’S BUILT FOR THE PAST 17 YEARS, DURING WHICH TIME HE’S SERVED AS CHIEF OF SURGERY AND CURRENTLY, IS CHIEF OF STAFF-ELECT AT BAXTER REGIONAL. He’s also a family man, involved in his church and lives an active lifestyle, which eats up a lot of his spare and weekend time.

Given all that, the Louisiana transplant could be forgiven for taking a pass on additional commitments. Instead, Lindsay has served on the Baxter Regional board for the past two years, a role he sees as time well-spent.

“I like being involved because when you’re involved, you learn how the specifics of the organization work,” he said. “There’s a lot more to it than just showing up and everything being there for you. You have to have this whole system behind each physician, basically to allow them to care for patients. It’s neat to learn how the organization works.”

Of course, Lindsay’s tenure hasn’t been exactly routine, coinciding as it has with the onset of COVID-19 and the board’s challenges in guiding the hospital’s response for patients and staff as well as managing resources accordingly.

“In the early part of 2020, the main focus was COVID, naturally,” he said. “Since the pandemic was announced, and we started having to shut down things in March of that year, access to patient care has been outstanding. Our nursing and ancillary staff busted their rear ends to keep access to patient care going. They have worked through some very difficult situations, and we could not have maintained access to patient care if they hadn’t really done such a wonderful job.”

Lindsay said this was not only important from a community health perspective, but also for the health of the organization overall.

“We had to think of this from a financial standpoint, too,” he said. “It’s not like we were working with an institution where you have millions and millions in the bank that you can just draw upon all the time. It’s money that’s constantly coming through, and if you don’t have that flow, you can’t buy the supplies you need or pay the bills you need to pay. There were real concerns at the start of this, and I think the way our financial department managed that was pretty spectacular.”

The board was also challenged to keep pre-pandemic goals and initiatives moving forward. Lindsay said bringing those initiatives off the bench after the initial onset of COVID was a delicate balancing act.

“Of course, the board never stopped looking ahead, but the focus had to be on the pandemic for months,” he said. “Toward the end of summer 2020, late 2020, we started being able to shift back. We had our procedures and protocols in place for the pandemic, and they’re running smoothly. People know what they’re supposed to do, they’re doing it and we could start moving forward.”

Once that focus shifted, the board found no end of challenges and opportunities to address, all of which boiled down to the hospital’s continued growth.

“Growth is our primary area of opportunity right now,” Lindsay said. “We’re at a point where some decisions are going to have to be made within the next few years to allow us to grow. I’m a surgeon, and we were just talking about it this morning in a block committee meeting: We’re going to have to expand at some point in the near future. How do we do that?

“Staffing is a huge issue right now for multiple reasons. You have travel nursing taking some nurses because, they get paid more. I can’t blame a nurse for doing that, but we have lost staff to that. We’ve also lost staff to just plain fatigue. I don’t think it’s anything anybody at the hospital has done wrong; every hospital in the state was short-staffed before the pandemic started, and it just got worse after the pandemic started.”

As for himself, Lindsay maintains physical and mental health through regular activities. He and his wife Melissa have a 5-year-old son, Eason, and like to spend time outdoors. An avid horseman, Lindsay also enjoys competing in Western events as a way to relax.