A blend of beneficence with business acumen brings high quality medical care for those in need. Healthcare Digital learns more from CEO Richard Whitney
Written by Anne-Frances Hutchinson & Produced by Lorraine Heist
For nearly three-quarters of a century, Mercy Hospital has served the people of New Zealand’s lower South Island. Founded in 1936 by the Sisters of Mercy as part of their mission to care for the sick and disenfranchised, today’s not-for-profit Mercy Hospital is a modern surgical facility with six operating theaters, including one fully-digital suite.
Mercy Hospital provides a full range of surgical services, with the exception of neurosurgery.
“Mercy Hospital differentiates itself from other private hospitals in as much as we are based on the workings of Catherine McAuley, the founder of the Sisters of Mercy, and as a consequence of that our core organizational values are about
charitable activity and supporting people who are unable to help themselves,” explains Mercy’s CEO, Richard Whitney.
Catherine McAuley established the religious group in Dublin in 1831 to serve Ireland’s sick and poor. The order arrived in New Zealand in 1850; today 259 Sister’s continue to work to improve the lives of people in New Zealand, Tonga and Samoa.
Mercy Hospital began as the 24-bed Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Royal Terrace. After 33 years in that location, the facility was rebuilt at its present Dunedin location in 1969. Loosely translated, Mater Misericordiae means Mother of Mercy; in 1988 the hospital’s name was modernized to Mercy Hospital, directly reflecting the founding organization’s mission and values.
ROOM TO GROW
In recent years, the growth in the demand for Mercy Hospital’s surgical services and for new services has grown significantly and by the early 2000’s it was clear that the area’s only private hospital had outgrown its facilities. In 2004, a custom built state- -of-the-art interventional catheter laboratory was commissioned with the introduction of cardiac surgery and an intensive care unit the following year.
“In addition to this we recently spent on the order of $10.5 million on a significant upgrade to the hospital, which includes a day surgery unit, theaters, the inpatient ward and supporting infrastructure,” Whitney notes. “In addition to that, we commit one-half million dollars each year to support the facility’s infrastructure upgrades.
“The hospital was commissioned in 1969, and while there have been improvements made over time, we got to a point where significant development was needed to effectively allow enough flexibility while also bringing us up to modern standards to support our services, which has increased significantly year on year for the last 10 years.”
The upgrade includes an extended inpatient ward with 42 stay-over beds; 26 of those are single en suite rooms. The improvements also include a custom-built day surgery unit with 24 beds and recovery chairs. “We also brought a number of theaters up to modern requirements, including building a fully digital theater. There was also an extension of the post anesthetic care units, the sterile supplies department, and a general upgrade in the infrastructure that supports all of those key areas.”
DAY TREATMENT
The creation of a dedicated day treatment operation within the hospital is designed to leverage Mercy’s investment in minimally-invasive technologies, such as laparoscopy. Of the six operating theaters, one is a digital unit built to accommodate the latest advances in technology.
According to Whitney, “The intention of Theater 6 was to amalgamate all the information in support of anesthetics surgery to an integrated system and achieve some economies of space in regard to the design of the towers that support surgery. It also accommodates the opportunity for teaching staff.” The digitized environment enables students to watch procedures from a remote location without disturbing surgery.
An additional specialist outpatient center, the Marinoto Clinic, features 22 medical suites. Opened in 1990 the clinic houses more than 60 specialists from most medical and surgical disciplines. The clinic also houses laboratory and radiology services including MRI and CT facilities.
AT HEART, CARITAS
As a religious order, the Sisters of Mercy focus on society’s social aspects, from the care of women, children and the elderly to education and health. That same ethos drives Mercy’s charitable outreach.
“With our ear, nose and throat (ENT) service, for example, we have the means of bringing together the objectives of serving children with a spin-off on improving the family environment and also personal and academic development from a language and communication skills point of view. It’s a very simple example of how our charitable outreach and our organizational values connect, Whitney says.
As a not-for-profit organization, Mercy Hospital channels any profit back into the hospital and three main charitable outreach areas. “We support the McAuley Chair of international health, which is a professorial chair at the University of Otago. The McAuley Chair was established to enable Mercy Hospital to participate in the commitment by the Sisters of Mercy throughout the world to support the Millennium objectives of the United Nations. The Millennium Project, launched in 2002, develops actions that are designed to “reverse the grinding poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people,” according to the UN project summary.
“Professor Philip Hill has been appointed to the chair and takes a wide brief on international health studies, specifically in the area of children and family with a special interest in tuberculosis. TB reaches back to the founder of the Sisters of Mercy, given that Catherine McAuley actually died of TB in the late 1800s,” Whitney explains.
“The second area of charitable activity is in charitable outreach where we support like organizations and charities. We are annual contributors to the local hospice for the care of the dying; the women’s refuge and Christian organizations such as the Salvation Army and the Catholic woman’s mission,” he adds.
The third area of interest differentiates Mercy from other private hospitals in New Zealand. Alongside the private surgical work undertaken at Mercy Hospital, their surgical outreach program provides partially- and fully-funded surgical services that would not otherwise be accommodated within the public sector.
“Our professional health organization provides as much elective surgery as our public equivalent within the same catchment area. We have a very proud history of doing things very well both from a technical and a surgical delivery point of view, but also from the patient’s experience point of view. Our mission and values and our organizational values are comprised of compassion, excellence, hospitality, integrity, justice and respect,” Whitney says.
“That is our goal of how we deliver our services. We balance our service delivery to ensure that we are commercially-viable and business-like in our operations while, in maintaining our values, deliver a service that has the patient’s viewpoint clearly in our thoughts.”
FACTS AT A GLANCE:
Company: Mercy Hospital Dunedin
CEO: Richard Whitney
Operations: Mercy Hospital Dunedin is a private, non-profit facility serving New Zealand’s lower South Island
Established: 1936
Employees: 200
Revenue: +NZ$20million
www.mercyhospital.org.nz
View Digital Corporate Profile of MercyHospital in Healthcare Digital January 2010