Kristy Carrington, BSN, RN, becomes chief executive of Providence’s North Division on Aug. 24, bringing lessons from her early career as an ICU nurse that she said continue to shape how she leads.
Ms. Carrington succeeds Kevin Brooks, who is moving into the role of chief executive of Providence Clinical Shared Services. She has led Providence Swedish in North Puget Sound since August 2022, overseeing Providence Regional Medical Center Everett, Swedish Edmonds and the Swedish Mill Creek Ambulatory Care Center.
She joined Providence in 2015 as director of acute care at Swedish First Hill in Seattle and went on to serve as chief nursing officer and in regional and divisional nursing executive roles. Before joining Providence, she was director of nursing at Keck Medical Center of USC in Los Angeles.
In her new role, Ms. Carrington will oversee Providence Swedish in Western Washington and Providence Alaska. She told Becker’s that her nursing background continues to shape how she approaches executive decisions, particularly when priorities compete. She also discussed what she plans to prioritize as she takes over the division, where standardization makes sense across distinct markets and what she has learned about scaling operational improvements.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How are you feeling about taking on this role, especially in the current industry environment?
Kristy Carrington: It is really an honor. I have to say, this is a really tough time for healthcare, especially across all of healthcare; I wouldn’t just say for healthcare providers. Everybody’s being asked to do more and to do things differently, and I think everybody feels this greater sense of urgency. And so being asked to step into this role, or being selected to step into this role, is something that I really take with a lot of gratitude, but also just a great deal of responsibility that comes with it.
For me, it’s really just focusing on access. How do we strengthen access for our patients, for our communities? It’s making sure that we are delivering on quality experience for our patients, our caregivers, our clinicians, and doing all of this while staying very grounded in Providence’s mission.
I started my career in healthcare as a bedside nurse. And so for me, when I do anything in my leadership, I always think about operational excellence and patient outcomes really being hand in hand with one another. And I look forward to really being able to continue the work of how we’ve been bringing our teams together here across Western Washington, but also Alaska. There’s been a lot of groundwork that’s already been done under Kevin’s leadership, and I feel very fortunate to be able to pick that up and carry it forward.
Q: You came up through nursing. What does that clinical background help you see that might otherwise get lost at the enterprise level?
KC: I think my start as a nurse in healthcare, I probably underappreciate how much it shapes how I lead.
Across any nursing, when you come into the role or come into the profession, you’re trained to assess your patients. You’re trained to assess these complex situations, complex different observations and assessments that you’re making, and then you have to kind of quickly prioritize what is it that matters most about what I’m going to do to take care of this patient. And then I think about how you’ve got a care team. You have to have really strong communication with the care team, and all the while, you have to do all of this staying really close to the fact that there is a human experience in all of the work that we do. And I know that that perspective, that human experience, has really stayed with me as I’ve moved throughout my leadership career and into broader executive roles.
Having started my career at the bedside, I think it gives me not just that firsthand experience and that look back to what our caregivers experience every day, but I think also recognizing that it’s also changed. The environment has changed since I delivered care at the bedside. It’s very different today than it was even then, which I think gives me a lot of respect for what our caregivers and clinicians are doing on the sharp end. And it always reminds me that when we make decisions, when we develop strategies, we execute on them, we really can’t have those be disconnected from the operations or the care that happens, because ultimately, if it doesn’t work for the patient, if it doesn’t work for the caregivers or the physicians or APCs, then it’s just not going to work, right?
With nursing you kind of develop a little bit of this practical kind of optimism, because you’re taking care of patients in their most vulnerable moments. And just from my experience, they were always very, very sick. Sometimes at their worst moments. And so you always have that kind of practical optimism of, OK, here are the things that we can do to help this patient get better. But also there’s a lot of chaos and a lot of different things that are happening in the environment, and you kind of learn to stay calm in this environment where there’s a lot of uncertainty.
And in an environment where there’s always so much happening, and there’s oftentimes a lot of uncertainty and maybe not total clarity at the moment, leading with that sense of calmness and bringing clarity where I can, having compassion, having discipline, and then just having ultimately that deep respect for the human experience.
Q: When you inherit a division whose markets look nothing alike, what is the first thing you try to standardize and the first thing you leave alone?
KC: What I’m going to have to start with, honestly, it’s hard for me to answer that because I think first I need to go listen and learn, right? There are parts of the division that I’m less familiar with, so it’s going to start with listening and learning.
I recognize the fact that each of the different markets, each of the different regions and communities, they’re distinct. Even though we are one division, each of our communities, each of our service areas are very distinct from one another. The communities are distinct. Their needs may be slightly different.
Ultimately, it goes back to what I said earlier. Priorities have to be really focused on access, quality, experience and also sustainability in an ever-growing, challenging environment. So I think that really kind of boils down to making sure we’re getting patients in for care, that it’s easier for them to get the right care in the right place at the right time. We need to improve clinical outcomes, making sure we’re supporting caregivers, and then ultimately strengthening the operational financial foundation, so that we can continue to be here for many generations to come.
As I think about where are the opportunities to kind of standardize, what I would just say is probably take a step back and say, if we can really look at [standardization], but doing so in a way that really meets those unique needs of the different communities that we’re serving. That’s kind of the place I would start, and then of course learning more.
I will also just say, when we look across the continuum of care, this is a journey we’ve already been on and we’ve already started, but how do we become more cohesive so that that experience for our patients can become less fragmented, more and more seamless? And again, it just goes back to easing the way for patients to be able to get care. When we can do that, it will not only improve the experience and outcomes for patients, but it will also improve the experience for our caregivers and our clinicians.
Q: Leaders are being asked to improve access, quality, workforce stability and financial performance at the same time. When those priorities compete, what guides where you put attention and resources first?
KC: I think you’re calling out just the natural tension that comes up when you’ve got all of these different forces that are all important, but oftentimes can sometimes compete.
In terms of prioritization, the way that I always think about this is, again, it goes back to the patient, right? And how does that translate to the patient? I have found that when I can lean on that as kind of my North Star, if you will, then oftentimes it becomes very much clearer as far as how do you navigate some of these competing forces and the tensions that exist.
The tensions are actually healthy tensions that should exist for us, honestly, because we’re dealing with people’s lives, their livelihoods, their well-being. It’s important that we’re taking into account these different forces and being really thoughtful, but again keeping the patient at the center of it.
Q: What have you learned about taking an operational improvement that works in one part of a health system and scaling it across a much larger organization?
KC: There are a lot of things you learn around what are some of the standards around best practices. I think that the key is going to be knowing how to adapt those in a different environment. There’s always going to be nuances, each place you try to take this standard out to.
And I think this is where, really just using the word nimble. I think being nimble about how you implement it. And when I say nimble, there’s sometimes going to be circumstances where there’s the resistance to change. I think that’s just a natural kind of human and organizational behavior anytime there’s something new coming in.
I take it back to what I was saying earlier, is going back to the patient, right? And how will these changes actually affect the patient? And in some cases, you also have to take that and apply it even to the caregivers and the clinicians that are doing the work. And that’s where I think that nimbleness comes in, to know that as you’re taking these standards and you’re rolling them out, that you’re doing so in a way that truly does ease the caregivers, but ultimately improves the outcomes for patients.
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