PORT TOWNSEND — Jefferson Healthcare hospital commissioners have selected a single candidate from five finalists to replace Chief Executive Officer Vic Dirksen, who will retire later this year.
The board members voted to select the candidate, whom they did not identify, at a special meeting Thursday morning.
“We are not offering this person the job,” said Jill Buhler, commission chairwoman.
“We are only bringing him in for further vetting.”
The hospital expects to pay the search firm around $80,000 to find the candidate, and does not have a proscribed salary range, even though “salary negotiations will begin immediately” once a replacement is chosen, Buhler said.
“We are looking for someone to run a $65 million corporation,” Dirksen, who earns $140,000, said at the meeting Thursday.
“We need to get the best candidate for this, and need to be willing to pay a competitive salary for the job.”
Buhler said the candidate will be identified publicly sometime next week at which time community meetings will be scheduled.
If the preferred candidate turns out to be unsuitable, the board would decide to choose from the remaining four, but would need to take a separate action to do so.
60 applied
About 60 people applied for the position. Search consultant Korn/Ferry International narrowed the pool to 15. After further winnowing, five finalists were invited for interviews.
Buhler said Thursday that the board could decide to continue discussions with any number of the candidates.
The meeting followed two days of interviews. Finalists met with the entire board individually, participating in what Buhler called “grueling hour-and-a-half interview sessions.”
Each candidate was scored on five objective criteria: rural hospital experience, physician relations, market share, operations and governance.
A fifth category, evaluating the candidates’s fit to the community and their management style, was included as part of a subjective evaluation.
The highest possible score was 30, and the selected candidate earned 28.
The others earned 25.5, 23.7, 17 and 15.
During a poll of board members on Thursday, all said they would be comfortable with the leading candidate, and the motion passed unanimously.
The board declined provide specifics about age, background, sex, region or experience, but did disclose the candidate has visited Port Townsend at least once.
“Any good candidate will want to give their current employer first notice so that the employer doesn’t hear about it from another source,” Buhler said.
After the board announced it would choose only one candidate, Tom Thiersch, one of two members of the public to attend the meeting, said he had observed the selection of the Port Townsend Schools System Superintendent, and noted “they had three finalists and two of them dropped out.”
Buhler said she hoped that would not happen in this case and that “the first thing we will do is to make sure this person is really interested in the job.”
Dirksen, 63, started in 1977 as administrator at St. John’s — the Catholic hospital that would evolve into the public hospital known as Jefferson Healthcare — and has led the hospital for the last 33 years.
He announced in January that he would at the end of the year.
As a critical access hospital under the voter-approved Jefferson County Hospital District, Jefferson Healthcare, formerly Jefferson General Hospital, last year generated revenue totaling $112 million with hospital charges of $47 million written off.
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
