Bill Bledsoe

New North Metro CEO connects business, nursing

Newly hired North Metro Medical Center CEO Bill Bledsoe has worked for years as a “program rebuilder” in medical centers, and he said he is excited to see North Metro in Jacksonville reach its full potential.
Newly hired North Metro Medical Center CEO Bill Bledsoe has worked for years as a “program rebuilder” in medical centers, and he said he is excited to see North Metro in Jacksonville reach its full potential.

In his first week as CEO at North Metro Medical Center in Jacksonville, Bill Bledsoe sat in the hospital conference room to discuss the future of North Metro and his role there. In his suit and tie, Bledsoe looked like a man who was in charge. But, he said, he is not going to sit behind a desk all day pushing numbers, hiding from the action of the hospital.

“This is probably one of the few times you’ll see me in a suit,” Bledsoe said. “I typically wear scrubs. This suit is intimidating to some people. Not all, but some. And to some it’s an insult. We’re going to lead by example, so how am I going to take care of patients in this suit?”

Bledsoe says he speaks two languages. They’re both English, but in the realm of hospital administration, he is able to speak the medical language and the business language so that he can effectively communicate with people in all aspects of his job.

It took awhile for Bledsoe to get to that point, but his passion for providing excellent care to his patients — whether they are in his hospital or directly under his care — has helped shape his career as someone who wants to bring out the best in medical institutions. That’s his plan for North Metro.

“The most important goal is to provide good patient care,” he said. “That’s not a ‘what if.’ That is going to happen. Then we need to do it consistently enough — every time — so the community begins to have more faith in us. I’m not saying they don’t have faith in us now, but we could always use more.”

Bledsoe grew up in Glenwood, learning life lessons from each of his parents.

“Mom was a very down-to-earth woman,” Bledsoe said. “She instilled values for me that were different than Dad. Dad taught us to work hard, work every day, and you do what the man’s paying you to do. Mom was the other side. She taught me the emotional piece. The compassion. The caring. … They balanced each other.”

After high school, Bledsoe wasn’t immediately interested in furthering his education. His father, however, had other plans for him.

“Dad gave me every horrible job he could think of over the next four to five years until I finally got tired of it,” Bledsoe said. “He told me that there was one way out of it, and it was to go to school. So Dad gave me a good life lesson.”

When Bledsoe was 25 years old, he received an associate degree in nursing from Garland County Community College. He went back and forth about what he wanted to do after that until he had a conversation with a hospital administrator.

“He basically told me I needed to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Bledsoe said. “He and I had a lot of different conversations back and forth, and he kept [saying], ‘You’re not speaking my language.’ I didn’t understand that because we were both speaking English. He told me that I was speaking clinical, but he needed someone to speak to him from the business side. I needed to learn both to be successful.”

That’s when Bledsoe decided to go back to school to earn a business degree. He got his bachelor’s degree and followed it up with a Master of Business Administration degree from Southern California University.

“I took his suggestion to heart, and now I speak two languages,” Bledsoe said.

After finishing school, Bledsoe said he went into “program rebuilding mode” within medical administration.

“That’s probably my specialty,” he said. “I go into programs that are not functioning as well as they should, and I have the ability to change that. A lot of places I’ve been, I was brought in just for that reason.

“A lot of it really boils down to you need to establish policies, procedures. You need to go through the whole process and tear the process apart to see if it’s functioning. You need to understand the flow. You need to set your outcomes based on evidence-based practices. You need to educate your staff to be successful. You need to hold people accountable, and they need to hold you accountable. A two-way street is always better than a one-way.”

Now, at North Metro, both the CEO and the CNO — chief nursing officer Michael Pruitt, registered nurse — are current in their nursing certifications and will be actively involved in patient care. Bledsoe said this will help him lead by example and really get to know what his employees and patients need.

“[He and I are] going to instill what we think the basic component of the hospital is, which is nursing care, taking care of patients,” Bledsoe said. “We’ll be the only hospital in the state where the acting CEO and CNO are involved in patient care. We’re both current in our [advanced cardiac life-support certification] and anything else we need.”

Outside of the hospital, Bledsoe plans to reach out to the community to start dialogue with leaders and learn how the medical center can better serve the people.

“We are going to have an outreach town-hall meeting with the community at a later date,” he said. “We want to begin to fix the infrastructure of the hospital before we go out. We’re going to do everything we could possibly do to get us turned around.”

Overall, Bledsoe is optimistic about the future of North Metro Medical Center.

“At the end of the day, we have a lot of really good people, and we’ve finally got the puzzle fixed,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll ever have anyone who works any harder than the team I have. And team is the key word.”

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