1996 Annual Report
Cheryl Kilsdonk, R.N.
Cheryl Kilsdonk couldn't believe what she was hearing. She was walking across the main PAMF lobby with an HMO official who had just completed an intensive two-day inspection of PAMF.
"This Clinic is wonderful," the inspector was saying. "I would bring my family here to be taken care of. I am really impressed."
Kilsdonk, who had spent the better part of two years working with virtually every manager and coordinator at PAMF to set baseline standards of care throughout the Clinic, flushed with pride. "I couldn't believe she said that out loud--in front of all the patients in the lobby," Kilsdonk recalls. "This was an auditor from an HMO who has inspected a lot of health care facilities. She has seen a lot of places, and she's objective. She didn't have to say anything like that, but it made me so proud to hear her say it."
Cheryl Lynn Kilsdonk, R.N., PNP (pediatric nurse practitioner), PAMF's Manager for Nursing and Clinical Affairs, has been helping people feel proud for eight years at PAMF. She has a bachelor's degree in administration and formerly was a head nurse at the adolescent unit at Stanford Children's Hospital, and was Director of Nursing at Cowell Student Health Center at Stanford.
Now she is seemingly everywhere at the Clinic, working to give substance to the core PAMF mission of improving and demonstrating health care quality.
As a manager, Kilsdonk has worked with nurses, physicians and administrators to set standards of nursing care and work redesign. As the accreditation coordinator, she worked to help establish standards at every level, from custodial services to reception to laboratory procedures--which paid off big when PAMF became the only health care provider to be accredited by both major national accreditation organizations in 1996.
Kilsdonk also handles thorny issues that don't fit under other departments, such as serving as liaison between staff and administration--sort of a "wild-card" administrator, a label that fits her well.
"People ask me all the time, `Cheryl, why do you do this job?'"Kilsdonk says with a smile. "They don't see what I get out of it. I love people and working with people at all levels. I like to see people grow, develop and open their minds. That's what I get from this job."
Most important, she says, is the chance to help shape formal policies and standards for the care of patients.
"I love to have a sense that I can change and transform an organization that I work for, and can do it in a positive way. For an organization to transform, you have to have transformational types of leaders whom people can trust--you have to have a feeling that there is a sense of honesty and integrity in your leaders.
"By making people believe in the changes we need to make, they will have the sense in their hearts that the change is important to both them and the patients."
Kilsdonk's earnest, positive approach comes naturally to her. She is a chaplain at the Unity Church on Middlefield Road, and she loves to garden, cook and work on creative projects. Kilsdonk sheepishly describes an elaborate St. Patrick's Day dinner she made for her husband, Skip, and 28-year-old son, Erik. (She has three other children: Steve, 36, Mike, 33, and Karen, 29.) It was a corned-beef-and-cabbage feast, complete with Irish decorations and Celtic music in the background. "I could just see their eyes rolling back in their heads and hear my son thinking, `Oh, mo-o-o-m,'" she says.
"The more creative I get the better person I become," Kilsdonk says. "It stirs my thought processes. I find that the more time I spend alone in nature, the more time I spend cooking in the kitchen, the more creative ideas come to my head at work. I feel positive and energized.
"Whether it is `work redesign' or dealing with a difficult person, my creative outlets let me expand my mind to be proactive and think about different ways to do my job and solve problems. And it makes it not seem so heavy."
Kilsdonk says she also can see her spirituality in her work. "It gives me a sense of everybody's interconnectedness--how important we are to each other.
"That includes the patient to the nurse, the nurse to the physician, the physician to the patient--there is an interconnectedness that is extremely important if we're going to do a good job."
Kilsdonk sees her job as facilitating that connection, enabling and empowering people to do their best at work. The end result of a better working environment is better patient care, she says.
"This business is so competitive now that only those who find that key to doing a good job in a cost-effective way will succeed. Always keeping an eye on quality, always keeping an eye on what the patient needs, and always keeping an eye on yourself and your contributions is what is important.
"If you can do that I think you can win, because that's something the patient who comes here for care can see."