Earlier this year, Francine Glenn was surprised to receive a call from the head of the health care collective she has worked with for years.
She didn’t know why he would call, she said, until he told her he wanted to be the first to congratulate her for SCP Health’s national Excellence in Leadership award.
“It was a great honor,” said Glenn, a nurse practitioner at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle. “I work with a great team and I couldn’t do it by myself. A lot of people right now are struggling to fill positions and cover shifts, but Baptist has a great team and we’ve kept it.”
Louisiana-based SCP Health has worked with Baptist’s emergency department since 2012, and Glenn has been the lead Advanced Practice Provider in the department since 2018. A Dec. 10 press release says Glenn was chosen from 10 candidates nationwide, all recognized for their “consistent demonstration of superior leadership and proven results at their hospital facility and with the organization.”
Glenn received the award at the company’s virtual annual leadership conference in September. The achievement comes after 34 years at Baptist, in which she has seen a lot of growth and change, she said.
“It’s nice to see people who were here when I first started in 1986, (since) there are still some of those people here,” she said. “We’ve grown this hospital a lot, and we have specialties that we never had before. It’s been somewhat of a journey.”
Glenn started working at Baptist two years after she finished her degree in nursing from the Mississippi University for Women. She grew up in Jackson, where her family still lives, and many of her relatives are also medical professionals, so “it was a natural following” for her to do the same, she said.
She worked in a variety of disciplines throughout the hospital, from pediatrics to surgery, and also gained some management experience before she decided she “missed the bedside” and went back to school to become a nurse practitioner, she said. Since completing the program in 1999, she has worked in the emergency room and currently manages providers’ schedules, though she still gets to work with patients at their bedsides, she said.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Baptist staff have done their best to maintain face-to-face communication with patients, Glenn said.
“We’re still going into a patient’s room, still in contact with the patients,” she said. “I think patients look for that communication, not to talk through a glass or an iPad or a speaker. They would like their provider to be in that room, close to them.”
Baptist started a triage program this year, which Glenn described as the ability to treat a patient quickly without setting them up in a room in the hospital.
“Nobody likes to wait,” she said. “A lot of times, people feel like (they have) something that can be managed pretty quickly, so it’s a huge patient satisfier.”
The press release cites the triage program and Glenn’s dedication to patient satisfaction as reasons she received the Excellence in Leadership award. Her career longevity is likely another factor, she said.
“People like to know a provider is stable (and) they don’t just come and go,” she said.
One of the things Glenn likes to do outside of work is read a lot, she said, which is important to her work with patients.
“People get their information from various sources, so I have to be able to know what the magazines are saying about certain things,” Glenn said. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there and Google is the biggest. I know when people have Googled (something). I say, ‘You’ve been on Google, right?’ And they say, ‘Yeah, I know, it’s making me crazy.'”
Even after all her years in healthcare and all the changes she has seen at Baptist, Glenn said she regularly remembers why she became a nurse in the first place.
“I find a patient every day that I say is the best patient of the day,” she said. “I’ll say, ‘You’re my number-one patient today. It’s just something that they do or say that really helps (remind me,) ‘That’s why you chose this career.'”
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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