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New boss ready to deliver at Beverly Hospital

By Paul Leighton
Staff writer
Published: November 18, 2008

BEVERLY — When Dr. Henry Ramini retired as an obstetrician in 1996, he asked his nurse to add up how many babies he had delivered in his 33 years on staff at Beverly Hospital.

The final count came to 5,280, the same number of feet in a mile.

"She came out of the office and said, 'You've delivered a mile of babies,'" Ramini said yesterday.

Ramini is now 76 years old, with a full shock of white hair and a slight hearing loss in his left ear, but the good doctor is being asked to deliver one more time.

Last week, the board of trustees at Northeast Health System, the parent company of Beverly Hospital, unanimously selected Ramini as their interim CEO. His appointment came on the same day that Stephen Laverty, the man Ramini helped to hire eight years ago, resigned as chief executive.

Laverty stepped down after a controversial year that included separate no-confidence votes in him by doctors and nurses and the arrest of a former hospital executive for allegedly stealing hospital property. Yesterday, Ramini and his staff were preparing for the picketers who were expected to show up this morning to protest the possible closing of the North Shore Birth Center, which Ramini helped start in 1980.

In an interview inside a conference room at Beverly Hospital, Ramini declined to discuss those controversies, saying only that hospital officials will have something to say publicly soon.

"We will be addressing those issues," he said.

Ramini said his main task as interim CEO is to help in the search for a new chief executive and to smooth over some of the divisions that have arisen among doctors, nurses and the administration.

"I'm going to try and bring all the factions of this hospital together so that we're all on the same page and we produce the product we're capable of producing," he said. "If I can get all the factions going in the same direction and get a quality CEO, I think there will be fertile ground for that person to get going."

Ramini's history with Beverly Hospital runs as deep an anyone's. He started as an intern in 1959 when a doctor in his hometown of Meriden, Conn., recommended him to a Beverly Hospital doctor named Richard Alt.

Ramini, who had graduated from University of Vermont College of Medicine, lived with his wife and two children in one of three houses set aside for interns on the hospital campus. The students from the former Beverly Hospital nursing school baby-sat for his kids.

After his residency in New Haven, Ramini returned to Beverly Hospital in 1963 and has been there ever since. His practice grew rapidly, from 400 to 2,000 deliveries per year, as fewer general practitioners delivered babies and obstetrician practices at the Hunt Center in Danvers and Addison-Gilbert Hospital in Gloucester closed.

Over the years, Ramini took on greater responsibilities outside his own practice. He was chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Beverly Hospital from 1982 to 1992 and president of the medical staff from 1993 to 1996.

When he retired as a practicing physician in 1996, then-CEO Robert Fanning asked him to join his management team in the newly created position of vice president of medical affairs. Two years later, Fanning asked him to become chairman of the board of trustees.

"Curiously, I went from being his employee to being his boss in one day," Ramini said.

During Fanning's tenure, Beverly Hospital had expanded from a single hospital to a system that included hospitals in Gloucester and Lynn, nursing homes and behavioral health centers. In the meantime, however, the hospital's buildings had started to deteriorate, and attempted mergers with Salem Hospital and Union Hospital in Lynn had failed.

The board of trustees, including Ramini, felt a change needed to be made. In 2000, the trustees hired Laverty, who had just come off a controversial tenure at Children's Hospital Boston.

Healing rifts

Under Laverty, Northeast Health System's net worth increased by more than $29 million while it spent nearly $100 million on new technology and improvements, including a new outpatient center in Danvers, according to trustees.

But rifts with doctors and nurses led to the no-confidence votes and criticism that Laverty and his staff employed a heavy-handed management style. The nurses union accused him of creating a "toxic work environment."

Whether or not Ramini can repair those rifts remains to be seen. Caleb Loring, who serves on the board of the Northeast Health Foundation, the organization's fundraising arm, said Ramini is a "genial guy" who has a deep history with the hospital.

"He's probably not a bad choice as an interim because he's been around a long time and has respect in certain quadrants," Loring said. "Steve did a lot of constructive things, but it's a tough job running a hospital. You've got everybody nipping at your heels."

Ramini had stepped down from the board of trustees in January and had been working on his golf game at Salem Country Club.

He said he probably would not have accepted the interim CEO job if he had not been chosen unanimously.

The search for a new chief executive is expected to take about six months. In the meantime, the reins will be in the hands of the doctor who has been delivering one way or another at Beverly Hospital for nearly 50 years.

"It's my home," he said. "It really is."

DR. HENRY RAMINI

Age: 76

Residence: Topsfield

Family: Wife Maureen, five children

Career: Delivered 5,280 babies as an obstetrician in Beverly from 1963 to 1996; vice president of medical affairs at Beverly Hospital from 1996 to 1997; chairman of Northeast Health System board of trustees from 1998 to 2008

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