Chapter 12: Joining an Institution that “Grabbed My Heart”
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Description
Here Dr. Summers explains how she joined MD Anderson. She recalls getting a call from a recruiter, but was not really paying attention until she heard the name, “MD Anderson,” and said, “Wait, can you repeat all of that?” Dr. Summers expresses how important it was to be offered an opportunity to work at this institution. She then describes the early interview and how she came to the decision to try for the position at MD Anderson.
Dr. Summers recalls coming to MD Anderson and standing for the first time in the lobby of the Clark Clinic. She describes how what she saw “grabbed my heard and it hasn’t let go of me.” She recalls sensing hope at the institution. She recalls her meetings with people and her sense that people came to work at MD Anderson specifically because of their commitment to the mission. She notes that even employees not directly related to research or patient care were somehow driven by a sense that they were contributing to the mission, and that “anyone can be instrumental” in forwarding that mission. Dr. Summers notes that even though sad events occur at MD Anderson, but it is a hopeful and joyful place with patients who have a great generosity of spirit.
Dr. Summers continues talking about her interview process and describes the scope of the role she was to take on as Director of Nursing as well as the four week transition period in which she finalized her work at the NIH and came to Houston.
Identifier
SummersB_02_20140401_C12
Publication Date
4-1-2014
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Barbara Summers, PhD, Oral History Interview, April 01, 2014
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Joining MD Anderson/Coming to TexasJoining MD Anderson Professional Path Personal Background Personal Reflections, Memories of MD Anderson Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents This is MD Anderson Offering Care, Compassion, Help Institutional Mission and Values MD Anderson Culture Patients, Treatment, Survivors Funny Stories
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
All right. So now we are recording officially, and the time is 10:54. I’m Tacey Ann Rosolowski, and today is April 1st, 2014. I am on the eighteenth floor of Pickens Tower in the Office of the Vice President, interviewing Dr. Barbara Summers for our second session together. So thank you very much for making this time for me.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
My pleasure.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And when we ended up last time, you were right at the point of telling me about you were at the point where you were coming to MD Anderson in 1997. So I know we strategized a little before the recorder was on, how you wanted to deal with the time you spent here. If you could tell me a little bit about who recruited you, why, and then those first steps, basically those first six years, what you wanted to summarize about that.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Yeah, surely. And the reason that I had expressed an interest in focusing most of our time on my position as chief nursing officer is that as I reflected on our first interview session, it seemed as though I was just really talking about myself all the time, and that is highly unusual for me to talk about me. And I know that’s okay, but I want to make sure that I have the opportunity to be able to speak to the practice of professional nursing at MD Anderson because it has such a wonderful legacy and I feel so proud to be able to be a part of that legacy.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Absolutely. Though I did want to say, from my perspective, I thought that the information that we covered about particularly the development of your research interests and the development of you as a leader was really essential for understanding what you bring to MD Anderson. So I did not—
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Oh, thank you.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—by any means feel as though that was time ill spent. (laughs)
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Thank you. Oh, well, I can’t wait to see what I said. (laughter)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No, I thought it was extremely valuable and very interesting.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Well, thank you. Thank you.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I look forward to seeing how that all plays out here at MD Anderson.
Barbara Summers, PhD:
Okay. Well, in 1997, I was in my position at the National Institutes of Health, and I believe it was late in the afternoon on a Friday, I think, and I was in my office. At that point I was in an administrative role, responsible for Critical Care Services and some Vascular Access Services. And I was doing my usual Friday desk cleanup, and the phone rang and it was from a recruiter, a headhunter. And I frequently got those phone calls. And she started doing her spiel about, “You know, I have this opportunity, and I was wondering if you’d be interested, and let me tell you a little bit about it.” And I was doing my usual being polite and listening to her as I was balling up pieces of paper I didn’t need anymore from the week before and tossing them into the trash basket like I was shooting goals from the basketball court. And she finally got to the end and said, “This opportunity is at MD Anderson Cancer Center.” And like mentally, I went [demonstrates], “Okay, back up. Could you start over again from the beginning?” Because the mere mention of the premier Cancer Center in the world just was astounding to me, that anyone would come to me about such an opportunity. And she repeated all of the information, describing a job as an administrative director for the largest clinical service in the institution, for the Hematology Services then, which included Leukemia and Lymphoma, and at that time called Bone Marrow Transplantation. So we had six outpatient clinics in that, and we had then six inpatient nursing units that went with it. So at the conclusion of the sales pitch, the headhunter and I agreed that she would call me the following day on a Saturday and we would do a telephone interview. And I was intrigued, very. I had colleagues who worked here at MD Anderson, Debbie Houston [Oral History Interview], being one, Mary Cunningham [phonetic] being another, Paula Reeger [phonetic] being another, very, very well-respected nurses in the oncology nursing circles. So I drove home and thought about how am I going to tell my husband that I’m talking to someone about a job in Texas, and I just, you know, sat down and spoke to him about. And, you know, being the wonderful man that he is, he said, “You know, when you got your doctorate, we knew that someday there might be an opportunity like this for you to be able to use that education and your experience.” And he said, “If this turns out to be the right job, then that’s a really good thing and we’ll go for it.” So I had my very in-depth interview with the recruiter the very next day, and it progressed rapidly to having me flown down here for my first set of interviews with a lot of different people. I spoke with—actually, before that, then I had to go meet the recruiter in person. I guess she had to make sure that I, you know, looked as legitimate as I appeared to sound on the telephone. But that was then followed by the flight down here to Houston. And one of the things that I will long remember is as I was on the plane flying to Houston, I was asking myself, “Now, where is Houston in Texas? I don’t really know. Maybe they have cowboys and tumbleweeds and that kind of thing there.” So I was greatly surprised when I arrived and found it was just like Florida, because I came here during the summer. And I checked into my hotel room, and I was anxious, of course, the night before. And the next morning I took the shuttle from the Houston Marriott Medical Center, which is still here today, and it dropped me off in front of the Clark Clinic lobby. And I walked into that lobby, which is where I was to meet the person who was going to greet me and take me to my interviews, and I had the opportunity to stand there for a few minutes and just take in what was MD Anderson, and it grabbed my heart and it hasn’t let go of me since then. Because as I got here, I saw patients and their family members who were sitting in the lobby—and at that time all of our medical records were paper—and these individuals, many of whom were new patients, were sitting patiently waiting to be called to be registered, and they had on their laps stacks of paper that were copies of their medical records and folders that had copies of their diagnostic imaging studies, and you could sense palpably hope in the atmosphere. There was just a tremendous sense of hope. And I felt at home, and I have not felt otherwise since then. So I had the opportunity to meet with a great many individuals, as is often the case, and particularly in the MD Anderson style you are subjected to nonstop interviews after interview after interview after interview after interview, and it gave me a good sense of the institution and of the people who worked here and the profound commitment that folks have to the mission of the organization, more so than in any other organization where I had worked.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What were you picking up on specifically at the time through these nonstop interviews?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
You know, what I was sensing so clearly is that people who come to practice here at MD Anderson, who come to work here at MD Anderson, regardless of their role, whether they are, you know, a world-renowned surgeon or hematologist-oncologist or a clinical nurse or a housekeeper, people come here to work because they are attracted to the mission of the institution, which is to eliminate cancer. And for those individuals who know that they can’t personally eliminate the cancer, what they understand is that they can still be instrumental in addressing that mission to eliminate cancer by making a difference in the lives of the people who entrust their care to us. So there was just this very, very strong commitment to our mission and also to the goal of making a difference in the lives of people with cancer. You know, I joke and say that one of the things about coming to work at MD Anderson is that no one wakes up one day as an employee and looks around and says, “Oh, my gosh, everybody here has cancer.” They know that coming in the front door, and that takes a special commitment when you come in here, and it takes an individual who has the capacity and the capability to understand that this is not a depressing place to be. It’s a very hopeful and filled-with-joy place to be that occasionally has sadness because people do die, but there is so much joy and so much hope here. And the gifts that we are given in form of generosity of spirit from the patients and their families, they’re just invaluable, absolutely invaluable. So I was able to see that with the patients and families as I interviewed, but I was also able to hear about that from the nurses and the physicians and the case managers and the administrators that I spoke with. So I had two days of interviews and then I was sent back and waited. And, of course, by now I was very intrigued and deeply wanted the job. (laughs) So I had to endure the interview process as other candidates were brought in here and interviewed. And I got a call probably three weeks later that I was one of two finalist candidates, and they wanted me to come back for a second round of interviews and bring my husband.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Can I ask you, you’ve talked about what attracted you to the heart of the institution. What about the position you were being offered? What were the challenges that were intriguing you about the job? And what was the job at the time?
Barbara Summers, PhD:
The job at the time was being the administrative leader for three distinct but related clinical care services: the Leukemia Service, the Lymphoma Service, and Bone Marrow Transplant Services. And administratively I had operational responsibility for the clinics, so there were six outpatient centers, the Physicians Office Practices plus the Apheresis Center, plus the Bone Marrow Aspiration Center, plus our Fast Track Laboratory. So I had that operational responsibility, and that was intriguing because there were a multitude of challenges in being able to effectively and efficiently see the numbers of patients that were coming through those centers. The volumes of patients were larger than anything I had ever experienced, and they were growing astronomically. Over the course of a three-year period, the volume of patients doubled in size. So we were constantly dealing with the challenges of not enough exam rooms and how do we schedule the physicians’ template so that we can accommodate the patient demand and also respect the physician need to have some academic time for their research and, you know, how do we expedite the processes of bringing patients into the institution. So a lot of those things were administrative challenges. And then on the inpatient side of my responsibility, I had operational responsibility for running six inpatient nursing units that were affiliated with those clinical services, so there were all of the inpatient operational responsibilities that one has of ensuring the quality outcomes for the patients who receive care, ensuring, both inpatient and outpatient, that the nursing team was appropriately credentialed and had competence to provide the care that the patients needed. Then also another really intriguing piece of it was that I would have responsibility for the activation of the new Alkek Hospital, because as I interviewed here, that was under construction. And when the Alkek Hospital opened, it was going to be used exclusively—well, not exclusively, almost entirely for the hematology patients. And so there were just lots of challenges, and it was a different environment at that time. And there were challenges, too, in terms of working with individual physicians and other members of the clinical team who could be sometimes badly behaved and unprofessional, and mostly reflected in outbursts of temper and, you know, just not able to find a way to channel that frustration or that anger or the energy in a way that could be productive. So all of that was presented to me as challenge, and I was told, actually, that although I had been informed about the challenges, that I couldn’t appreciate the magnitude of the challenges until I got here, and wasn’t that ever the case. But I got here and it was good. I brought my husband down for that second interview, and we went out and looked at housing, and, you know, we had the obligatory dinner with the spouse to make sure that he was not an axe murderer or anything crazy. (Rosolowski laughs.) And, you know, we looked around Houston and we felt very comfortable here because it’s a very southern town in the way that people interact with one another, and since we’re both Virginians, that kind of resonated with us. So two weeks later, I was offered the position and I accepted it, and I gave my notice at NIH, and I had a four-week period of time where I was doing transition between leaving NIH and starting at MD Anderson. And in that time, we had to put our house on the market in Virginia, had to find temporary housing for me down here, and then had to make our plans for getting me down here with a car. So we found a furnished apartment that was very close by, and the plan was my husband would stay up in the D.C. area with the dog and one of the cats. I would be down here with one of the cats. And that worked out well for the first couple of months because, of course, the hours that I was working were horrendous. I missed my husband, but it was just as well he wasn’t here because I didn’t have to feel guilty because I was neglecting him.
Recommended Citation
Summers, Barbara PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 12: Joining an Institution that “Grabbed My Heart”" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1249.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1249
Conditions Governing Access
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