HHC Profiles
Meet Mandy Richards, HHC’s first Chief Nursing Officer
By Hilary Waldman
Throughout her personal and professional pursuits, Amanda “Mandy” Richards is driven by one question: “How do I make a difference in people’s lives?”
She brought the question to the bedside when she started as a critical care nurse in her native Australia.
She packs it when she travels to Russia, where she and her husband help forgotten children in orphanages.
She thinks about it daily as she settles into her new role as Hartford HealthCare’s first chief nursing officer.
Mother of two teenagers, Richards was chief nursing officer at Allina Health, a not-for- profit system with 12 hospitals in Minnesota and western Wisconsin, when she received a message from a recruiter. Hartford HealthCare was looking for its first system-wide executive vice president and chief nursing officer.
She experienced the growing pains of creating a coordinated healthcare system from a collection of autonomous entities, and it was not the first time she would jump off the cliff for an opportunity, willing to confront uncertainty.
Richards joined Allina 15 years earlier after she, her husband, Anthony, and their then-2-year- old daughter, Emma, left Australia. After retaking certification exams, she was hired as a critical care clinical nurse specialist at an Allina hospital. Within months, she was elevated to manager.
“I’ve always been willing to step into new roles that initially make you uncomfortable, in order to continue to learn and grow,’’ Richards said. She was drawn to HHC by our commitment to innovation and the challenge of elevating the importance of nurses in our organization.
Among parallels between Allina and HHC, she said, is a culture of continuous improvement, which we call Lean.
She recalled an Allina hospitals grappling with a backlog of psychiatric patients in its Emergency Department (ED). To address the problem, psychiatrists, ED physicians, directors, nurses and others participated in a process improvement meeting similar to our Kaizen. They developed a solution, which spread organically to other hospitals as leaders involved in the process adopted the standard work, creating a more uniform patient experience.
Richards said that’s how she envisions spreading best practices across HHC.
“You’re trying to create a best practice to improve the quality of care we provide to patients, so why should it be different at Hartford Hospital than it is at HOCC?’’ she asked.
When not thinking about improving patient outcomes, Richards enjoys traveling with her family, which includes 13-year-old George. Her husband, a corporate executive, traded his suit for a clerical collar in Minnesota as an ordained Christian minister. Much of their travel involves mission work, including running summer camps where Russian orphans learn life skills and that someone cares about them.
Richard also continues to challenge herself to make a difference.
“I want to make sure in my lifetime I make the biggest impact I can on not only patients, but on the nursing profession,” she said.