Hospital focuses on its north star in troubled times

Valerie Powell-Stafford was coming up on the one-year anniversary of her appointment as CEO of Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg when the coronavirus pandemic derailed any celebratory mood.

Instead, Powell-Stafford, named CEO of the 288-bed facility effective April 1, 2019, went into crisis-management mode as her one-year mark came into focus. Her first moves were to implement a surge plan shared by HCA Healthcare, which operates Northside and more than a dozen other hospitals in the region. An executive with HCA Healthcare since 2008, including a recent stint as CEO of Englewood Community Hospital, Powell-Stafford treated the early days of the crisis like triage, working problem-by-problem. “We tried to deal with each thing as best we could,” she says.