ILWACO — Merry-Ann Keane knows her path to the C-suite isn’t like most others in the world of healthcare and hospital management.

The new CEO of Ocean Beach Hospital brings with her a clinical background, not a financial one. But she believes that her journey over three-plus decades, from a nurse to clinical instructor to manager and then onto administrative positions, has given her the experience needed to be able to oversee OBH.

“Being able to look at the entire puzzle and making all the pieces fit together, that for me is so rewarding,” said Keane last week, who began as the hospital’s CEO in mid-September.

Pull Quote

‘All the people who work here care for their friends and their family and their community, and that is very unique and it brings a different perspective to how we care for people.’

Merry-Ann Keane, Ocean Beach Hospital CEO

Keane takes over for Scot Attridge, who resigned due to a health issue in April after serving as CEO since August 2022. Attridge’s predecessor, Larry Cohen, served as interim CEO while the hospital district’s board of commissioners conducted a search that ended with the hiring of Keane, whom chair Nancy Gorshe called the board’s “top pick.”

“She has excellent healthcare management experience, hands-on medical provider experience, and is an advocate for advancements in rural healthcare,” Gorshe said in a statement announcing Keane’s hiring. “We are thrilled to have a proven leader of Merry-Ann’s stature assume this executive position.”

Clinical background

Keane was born and raised in Edmonton, the capital of the Canadian province Alberta, and started her career in neighboring British Columbia. She credits her husband’s family for sparking her interest in becoming a nurse.

“I actually thought I would be an early childhood educator, to be fair,” she said. “Then I met my husband, and we’ve been married for 34 years. His dad was a doctor and his mom was a dentist, and both of his sisters were nurses. Somehow it just ended up, ‘Well, why would you do that when you could be a nurse?’ and … that’s really how I ended up in nursing, I kind of fell into it.”

Keane earned a nursing diploma from Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta, and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the British Columbia Institute of Technology, where she also received nursing specialty certifications in both neonatal and perinatal care, which concerns the medical care of a mother and her newborn in the periods before, during and after the child’s birth. She later earned a master’s degree in nursing leadership from the University of British Columbia.

“When I found perinatal and neonatal nursing, I knew I’d found my calling. As part of perinatal and neonatal nursing, you do a lot of education with the patients and I realized I really liked that, too,” Keane said. “So my first foray sort of outside and away from the bedside was when I became a clinical nurse educator. I was teaching other nurses how to perform some of the more unusual functions or giving them education and resources they needed.”

Keane continued her rise as a health services manager and nurse manager, and was hired as Chief Administrative Officer and Director of Clinical Services at PeaceHealth Peace Island Medical Center in Friday Harbor.

“I fell into management, and I got there and I felt, wow, I can make a difference — not just in one person’s life as you do with one patient, but with many people’s lives — and realized I really enjoyed it and realized I was making a difference,” Keane said.

Her first job as CEO was in Wheatland, Wyoming — a town of about 3,500 — where she also served as Chief Nursing Officer at Banner Health Platte County Memorial Hospital. Most recently, she had been the CEO of Newport Hospital & Health Services in Washington’s northeast corner since October 2022, and has nine years of healthcare administrative experience in total.

Passion for rural health

Keane’s recent stops in small communities like Friday Harbor, Wheatland and Newport before finding her way to the peninsula aren’t accidental.

“I have always had a passion for rural health,” she said. “Rural health serves our sickest patients in the nation, and many tend to be socially disadvantaged and have a lack of access to care. That, for me, is huge; I believe everyone deserves healthcare.”

Keane recently took over as chair of the Washington State Hospital Association’s (WSHA) Rural Hospital Committee, and also serves as chair of WSHA’s Rural Hospital OB Subcommittee. Additionally, she serves on the board of The Rural Collaborative, which OBH was a founding member of in 2003 and now includes 27 members throughout the state and is focused on partnering to defend and improve rural healthcare.

“It is very different from working in a big city — I’ve done both, and I just love having the connection with the people and the community. All the people who work here care for their friends and their family and their community, and that is very unique and it brings a different perspective to how we care for people,” Keane said. “I also love being able to affect change in a small community, and I think I come with a little bit of a different perspective.”

At OBH, Keane thinks there’s an “amazing” team in place and she’s excited to help them grow for the community’s benefit. She’s spent time doing rounds each day during her first few weeks on the job to meet with staff and find out how they’re doing and what their needs are.

“I truly believe in servant leadership, so really it’s my job to make sure people have what they need to do their jobs well,” she said. “So I like to ‘round’ every day to do that, and I’ve gotten to meet a lot of the staff.”

Bond update

One thing that Keane’s particularly excited about is the bond projects that voters overwhelmingly approved in August 2023. OBH in the spring issued general obligation bonds to finance a slate of capital facilities projects that were identified to help garner support for the $10 million bond measure, headlined by the renovation of their Ilwaco clinic and the construction of an urgent care clinic to be housed at that expanded facility.

Keane announced that Cohen, after serving as interim CEO for the past several months, will be staying on at OBH as its chief project officer. His focus will be on ensuring that the district’s bond projects are completed in a timely manner.

“The biggest move that we’ve made forward is we now have somebody dedicated to making this happen,” Keane said.

While the expanded Ilwaco clinic and urgent care clinic are two of the more notable projects, Keane is also excited about several others that she said will positively impact quality of life for both patients and staff once completed. Updating the nursing unit is one of those projects, as are expanding the hospital’s in-house pharmacy, updating imaging equipment like MRIs and CT scans, and overhauling the hospital’s HVAC systems.

Keane expects that the hospital will provide an update at the district’s monthly board meetings on where things stand with the bond projects, and said that the board has committed to adopting a one-year strategic plan “so you will know exactly what the hospital is working on, what the clinics are working on and how we are doing in that process.”

“I think you’re going to start hearing more about the bond projects and what we are doing and how we are doing them, because the fact that the community rallied around the hospital and supported that is huge, and we need to make sure the community knows that we are spending the dollars the way that they intended,” Keane said.