2012 Health Care Professional: Margaret Hall, Northwest Hospital

Margaret Hall took an unconventional track on her journey to her current position as chief of cardiology and medical director of the Cardiac Rehabilitation Program at Northwest Hospital in Seattle.

When she married at a young age, she was happy to be a wife and mother, but her former husbands diagnosis of cancer, and the need to support her family as he recovered, pushed her to go to school for a two-year nursing degree. Hall became a physicians assistant when few did, then pursued medical school at the University of Washington with two young children in tow, at a time when most doctors were men.

It gave me a whole wealth of life experience that most physicians dont have, she says.

Hall notes its still unusual for women to pursue the emergency-driven specialty of cardiology. Not having complete control over your time is not compatible with family life for most women.

As a leader, she tries to build consensus rather than steamroller people. My job is to get people to do what they ought to do, she says, but [also] to like it.

An excellent clinician, she has encouraged greater emphasis on empowering patients. The key to such care, she adds, is to elevate the general level of health education by helping patients understand how their bodies really work. She has evangelized that principle to her colleagues as well.

Accurate knowledge, Hall believes, can help patients be better prepared to query their doctors, and doctors should help them to acquire it. Understanding simple things, such as how to manage medications and how to judge natural remedies better, she attests, can support better outcomes.

Hall would like to apply those principles to a larger conversation about how to improve the management of health care in the United States. I want to be on the front lines of that, she says.

SILVER AWARDS

Richard Caggiano
Chief Medical Officer
Pullman Regional Hospital
Caggiano organized the emergency medical group in 1998, establishing from the beginning a standard of excellence by insisting on hiring only board-certified or certification-eligible emergency physicians and retaining them. Not a single emergency department physician he hired has departed the hospital. During Caggianos 12-year tenure as EMS director, the number of emergency department visits has grown from 5,000 to 10,000 per year, with an average wait time of less than 15 minutes and a total length of stay of less than 2.5 hours. Steve Wehrly

Shannon Fitzgerald
Chief for Advanced Practice Services
Seattle Childrens Hospital
A 30-year practicing pediatric nurse, Fitzgerald strives to deliver the same quality care to underserved patients globally as she does to patients at Seattle Childrens. Using her experience developing programs as part of the Washington State Nursing Commission, Fitzgerald has led projects in Haiti, Madagascar, Ghana, Romania and Zambia, focusing on creating self-sustaining networks for care by teaching local clinics best practices. Fitzgerald and her husband also run a series of fundraising events around Seattle, including Potluck for Pots and Zumba for Zambia. Sarah Dewey