I am proud of my tenure on the Sibley Memorial Hospital Board of Trustees, which ends June 30 after nine years — and especially proud that Sibley has just earned its “Hospital Triple Crown”: the CMS 5-Star Quality Rating, the Leapfrog “A” Hospital Safety Grade, and Magnet® designation for nursing excellence, held simultaneously. Only about two percent of hospitals in the country hold all three concurrently.
This is what stewardship looks like when it accumulates.
Nine years. Two board chairs. Two hospital presidents. The deepening of Sibley’s integration into Johns Hopkins Medicine. A pandemic that rewrote every operating assumption a community hospital had. The arrival of artificial intelligence and the governance questions that arrived alongside it. A high-stakes payer standoff in which Johns Hopkins Medicine, including Sibley, went out of network with UnitedHealthcare rather than accept terms that would not have served our patients. And the slow, sustained, equity-anchored work of extending patient-centric care to the entire community we serve — through Ward Infinity, Sibley’s community innovation initiative supporting entrepreneurs in DC’s Wards 7 and 8.
Some of that work made the headlines. Most of it did not.
But some of it made the book. When Sibley’s institutional history — INSPIRED: Chronicles of Sibley Memorial Hospital, by Robert L. Sloan — was published, I found myself in Chapter 68, “Governance and the Power of Philanthropy,” front row, in the 2019 Board of Trustees photograph, listed by name among my fellow trustees. There I am. In print. In the history of an institution that has been serving this region since 1890.
This was incredibly meaningful to me as a patient who started by working with the Innovation Hub, moved to monthly meetings with the hospital president, and published a paper on our mutual mentorship.
Three themes stand out:
First — stewardship creates sustainability. Your decisions outlast your term.
Second — Equity is a quality metric. A hospital that is excellent for some of its community and absent from the rest is not yet excellent.
Third — often governance means holding the line.
Nine years. A chapter in the history book. A Triple Crown earned. And a Board of Trustees, a group of friends, whom I will miss and will continue to support in ways large and small.
PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYS
- Before accepting a board seat, ask yourself honestly: am I willing to do work whose payoff I may not see during my term? The answer reveals whether you are a director or a guest.
- When the institution publishes its history, will the decisions you helped make hold up in print? Govern as if the history book is watching. Because it is.
