Staff Writer

Whatever it takes. That’s the philosophy Carol Butler, RN, MSN-HCA, carries with her when she opens up a new hospital.
With the opening of a 171-bed hospital in Las Vegas under her belt, Butler is currently knee-deep in the process again as the much-anticipated OrthoColorado winds its way to a summer opening.
“Oh, this is manageable,” the OrthoColorado chief nursing officer said. “This is very doable.”
The new 88,000-square foot specialty hospital is expected to staff more than 200 and serve as a center of orthopedic excellence in the Rocky Mountain community. The facility will be situated on the new St. Anthony Medical Campus which will yield a new 222-bed replacement hospital for St. Anthony Central Hospital.
Just as OrthoColorado is being created from the ground up, so are policies, procedures, expectations and staffing requirements.
“It is very exciting. I’m really excited about certain aspects of this position,” Butler said. “One is that it is a specialty hospital and it has a focus. If you can narrow the focus you can do things very, very well. And just the vision that Centura and this group of physicians has for this facility to be a center of excellence.
“They really want us to be a place where everybody wants to come for orthopedic surgery. They want the reputation for this facility to just be phenomenal. As a nurse, that’s something you can just latch on to. That’s why I went into nursing, I want patient care to be phenomenal.”
Phenomenal care starts with vision at the top. Butler knows that there’s no substitute when it comes to patient care for clinicians calling the shots.
“It’s absolutely crucial,” Butler said. “The number one way to keep patients safe is to focus on making nursing work as efficiently as possible. By paying attention to the people that touch the patients everyday and what they need to do their job today.
“Nurses are the ones that touch patients more than any other single group of healthcare providers. It’s absolutely essential in my mind that someone at the administrative level have that clinical view and have years of experience taking care of patients and understand how that works.”
Butler’s book on opening a new facility is pretty short, although she admits to carrying more than a few to-do lists with her.
“My first task here is to hire strong leadership to work with me in all the areas I oversee,” Butler said. “I’m focusing heavily right now on interviewing management and front-line supervisor positions, charge nurses, leads and so forth. Getting those people in place early on so they can help me write policy and the process. To me it’s essential that I get strong, knowledgeable leadership in place to help me as we go through putting policy and process in place.”
From initial interviews, Butler said she’s made it clear to applicants that the staff will be expected to do whatever it takes when it comes to ensuring quality outcomes.
Butler herself has no qualms about pushing gurneys, starting IVs or answering call lights. That’s the reason her lab coat hangs behind her desk and her scrubs are a drawer away.
Butler’s experience comes from her nursing career and the experience she had two years ago opening up a 171-bed, full service hospital complete with women’s services, an emergency room and an ICU.
“It was a challenge,” she says. “I did come with a list of things. Things to never do again and things to be absolutely sure I do.”
But to be sure, Butler says her top priority is laying the groundwork for what a quality hospital will look like. That starts with hiring.
Butler says the opportunity in front of the yet-be-hired staff is immense.
“It is a lot of hard work, there is no way around that,” Butler said. “There’s no shortcut to plodding your way down the list of things that have to be done. You know there’s still going to be things to work out ... but the flipside is it’s an opportunity to come in and be on the ground floor of creating a culture of clinical and service excllence.
“I just don’t know very many nurses that wouldn’t want to do that. That’s what nurses go into nursing for. They want to give excellent care to their patients and they want to work collaboratively with other peple in the building.
“That’s the vision of this hospital and that’s the opportunity we have - those of us who open this place - to create that culture and drive that home.”
Hiring events for the LakeWood facility will be held this month. For more information go online to www.orthocolorado.org.