As the new COO of UF Health Jacksonville (Fla.), Kerin Da Cruz, MSN, RN, is drawing on more than three decades of experience in clinical leadership to expand access, ease capacity strain and align operational growth across northeast Florida.
In May, she was promoted from chief nursing officer to COO of the 695-bed academic medical center, the region’s only state-approved level 1 adult and pediatric trauma center. Her career began at the bedside and progressed through nurse manager roles to senior executive positions at hospitals across Rhode Island and Connecticut, including Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health.
In her new role, Ms. Da Cruz is applying her foundational clinical experience to create new access points, improve throughput and strengthen alignment across teams — efforts aimed at reducing strain in inpatient settings and supporting sustainable, systemwide growth.
In a conversation with Becker’s, Ms. Da Cruz shared how her nursing background is shaping her leadership strategy, why vulnerability is essential to building strong teams and how the system is rethinking capacity from both ends of the care continuum.
Question: You recently moved from CNO to COO. What made this transition a natural fit for you? What strategic advantages does your nursing background bring to the COO role?
KDC: This transition felt like a natural evolution in my career because operational leadership has been central to my work for many years. Nursing leadership gave me the opportunity and honor to care for patients directly and afforded me the foundational experience in creating and developing exceptional teams. I’ve been fortunate to have had a variety of healthcare leadership roles, including vice president of operations, chief administrative officer and more. My most recent leadership role as COO at UF Health Jacksonville has added to the depth and breadth of that experience. I firmly believe that nurse leaders are uniquely positioned to understand and ultimately impact care quality, operational efficiencies and fiscal stewardship, and drive the strategic growth that is crucial to the health of our overall hospital system.
Q: How do you plan to leverage your nursing leadership experience to influence hospital operations and service line growth?
KDC: All leadership demands agility, collaboration and the ability to bring teams together to drive forward toward a desired outcome. I have seen how fragmented care can be, even when delivered by the most well-intended health systems. My clinical background has provided me with direct insight and knowledge of the patient and family experience in the hospital setting. This advantage allows me to coordinate and align our clinical growth programs across our Northeast Florida region to minimize fragmentation. We have created teams whose goals include improving access to care in our physician practices, streamlining handoffs to specialty care and recruiting the best and the brightest to care for our patients and community. As we look across our region, my goal is to ensure our growth strategy is anchored in operational readiness and clinical alignment, not just volume projections. All the components must be connected and all members of the team must understand the importance of that interconnectivity, so that our patients experience a seamless delivery of care.
Q: A new national survey of nearly 1,700 hospital executives ranked quality of care and patient safety as the top priority in their nursing strategy. How are you thinking about improving patient safety and care quality in a sustainable way at UF Health Jacksonville?
KDC: At UF Health Jacksonville, we are committed to embedding patient safety and quality into every layer of our operations. As such, we constantly analyze various situations and collect key data throughout each day to ensure we are proactively identifying areas of opportunity. We do this not only on a strategic, long-term basis, but also day to day and shift to shift. We are strengthening our leadership teams, expanding clinical education and investing in a culture of safety where continuous improvement is expected and supported. Safety and quality must be foundational in our daily work for us to be successful. We are creating a culture where preoccupation with safety and preventing harm is a transparent process that is shared, and most importantly, celebrated. We have structured our meetings to include the review of safety events for prevention, as well as patient stories, to keep us grounded in the work we do and remind us why we are in healthcare.
Q: What’s an uncommon (or unpopular) leadership or healthcare operations opinion you hold?
KDC: I believe that leaders need to be comfortable demonstrating vulnerability. Vulnerability to me is not a weakness. It is the most effective way to build psychological safety with your team and others within the organization. When teams feel safe, they communicate openly, demonstrate increased adaptability and can make effective decisions. I also believe that understanding my own areas of vulnerability, or opportunities, allows me to recruit and work with people who not only make me a better leader, but who ultimately make our organization stronger. It shows we are open to learning and reinforces that, more often than not, we learn more from our failures than our successes. If people are afraid, they can’t lead. My purpose is to create the culture, space and opportunity for those I lead to excel and become their best selves.
Q: Emergency department capacity and workforce strain remain key challenges for hospital leaders across the country. As COO, what operational levers are you focused on to address these pressures?
KDC: We are not unique insomuch that we have similar challenges as other hospitals. Like many hospitals, we have similar challenges to overcome in terms of capacity and throughput. Where we are unique is in the patient volume we see every day. We are the region’s safety net hospital, and the only state-approved adult and pediatric level 1 trauma center, so our capacity is constantly taxed.
Our staff does an amazing job of moving people through our emergency department and trauma center while giving them the compassionate, expert care they need and deserve. We are moving upstream in terms of our strategy to build or leverage our resources in the region by delivering the correct care in the correct location. Some of our campuses have capacity, so we are implementing processes, including a new ambulance transport program, to be sure we match capacity with demand. We are coordinating access from our freestanding emergency and urgent care centers, so patients are directed to the campus that has capacity, resulting in decreased wait times.
We are also highly focused on our prehospital strategy, which includes opening additional primary care locations throughout the region, so patients don’t have to seek primary care in our emergency departments. We are expanding our urgent care and telehealth platforms to also help fill the access gap. We know that implementing these critical resources, along with refining our internal throughput processes, will ultimately lead to improved access and care for our patients.
