New VA head focuses on vets, employees
John Gennaro has packed a lot into his first week on the job as director of the Cincinnati VA Medical Center: visiting the nine-floor main hospital in Corryville, the satellite facility in Fort Thomas and the six VA clinics in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.
His goal in taking over the sprawling medical complex is confronting the question, “How does this impact the veteran?” Gennaro said Monday. “If we can’t answer that question, it may not be a good idea to proceed down that path.”
The Cincinnati hospital and its clinics care for 43,000 veterans with a budget of more than $387 million.
Gennaro arrives at a time of continuing turmoil within the Department of Veterans Affairs, and Gennaro, 38, said Monday he also aims to focus on the needs of the people who work at the VA Medical Center. Nurses at the hospital conducted informational picketing earlier this year to complain of conditions there.
On his first day July 27, Gennaro said, he presided at a town-hall meeting with VA employees to let them know that he also intends to improve the work culture and experience.
“My philosophy is that if we have engaged, happy employees who are excited to come to work, that’ll translate into better customer service for our veterans,” he said.
Gennaro is a native of Parma, Ohio, and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Xavier University. He has spent his working life at the VA. He was a budget manager at the research foundation of the Cincinnati VA, completed an administrative residency at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, and served as deputy director of the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System and associate director at the Erie VA Medical Center in Pennsylvania.
From February 2012, he was director of the VA Butler Healthcare until he was named director of the Cincinnati VA in May.
Monday, Gennaro invited reporters to sit in on a roundtable discussion with several leaders of VA initiatives, such as the Tele-Intensive Care Unit at the main hospital, where doctors and nurses stand by 24 hours a day to care for patients in VA hospitals as far aware as Georgia and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Other Cincinnati VA leaders talked about the women’s health program; the hospital-in-home program, which provides care to veterans who cannot travel to a facility; the local homeless-veteran outreach; and the program to help veterans recover from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“There’s a lot of great stories and successes and a lot of work and effort that goes into all those programs, and each one of them has a wealth of information for the community and other veterans to know. And that’s our goal,” Gennaro said.