Leaders from Naval Medical Center San Diego (NMCSD) held an executive planning conference at the Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Miramar Officer’s Club, October 29 and 30. The purpose of the conference was to collaborate on strategies to accomplish NMCSD’s joint mission with Navy Medicine Readiness and Training Command (NMRTC) San Diego and synchronize these lines of effort (LOE) in support of Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Surgeon General (SG) and Defense Health Agency (DHA) objectives.
While NMCSD is a DHA military treatment facility (MTF) providing health care services, NMRTC San Diego maintains command and control of all Navy personnel assigned to the MTF and focuses on expeditionary medicine. These organizations operate in parallel, sharing the same physical location and leadership—the NMCSD director is also the NMRTC commanding officer.
The team’s effort focused on opportunities, actions, challenges, and mitigations to achieve a collective plan for success on matters such as the Integrated Referral Management and Appointing Center (IRMAC) expansion, patient experience and satisfaction, virtual health, critical staffing deficits and improving hiring timelines.
There are two overarching command priorities which are staffing and patient volume, explained Capt. Elizabeth Adriano, NMCSD director and NMRTC San Diego commander.
“We need to make sure that we’re all on the same page, playing with the same sheet of music, moving toward the same goals,” said Adriano. “And in order to get there, we may have to have some hard conversations.”
The foundation for the conference, laid out by Adriano during her opening statements, is to build upon what has been accomplished during the last year, discuss support expectations and leverage prior challenges to improve mission and lines of effort. She added that the CNO’s priorities and Culture of Excellence (COE 2.0) will be their guiding principles.
“Those are all super important moving forward. Those are the philosophies, the ways of life, the ways of communicating, the ways of supporting our people that are going to underpin what we do,” said Adriano.
Capt. Marcy Morlock, NMCSD and NMRTC San Diego executive officer, emphasized how the two-day meeting supports a unified strategy that incorporates objectives from the CNO, SG and DHA.
“When you look at the CNO’s principles, the SG’s priorities and DHA priorities, there are a lot of commonalities, which leaves plenty of opportunities for integration and collaboration because we are all part of the same DoD mission,” Morlock said.
Morlock also shared her optimism with the group, pointing out that, “What we’ve done in 16 months speaks volumes to the dedication and commitment of the San Diego team. We are a large medical center and being able to accomplish all that we have in such a short period of time is nothing short of amazing. We need to make sure we don’t lose sight of this.”
Senior enlisted leader Command Master Chief Adolfo Gonzalez conducted an overview of the CNO’s guidance, the COE 2.0 approach and the “Get Real, Get Better” (GRGB) leadership standards as a guiding principle for the conference. According to My Navy HR, COE 2.0 “focuses on building Great People, Great Leaders, and Great Teams, with the knowledge that this is the best way to prepare for victory in combat, innovate and solve hard problems, and prevent human behaviors.”
On the second day of the conference, leaders from Naval Hospital and NMRTC Camp Pendleton joined the San Diego team to discuss mutual interests, including joint initiatives for a patient transfer center, pharmacy, and virtual medical center. With both MTFs being just over 40 miles apart, these collaborations seek to leverage resources and expertise that can be shared in support of their joint mission of delivering health care excellence and building readiness.
Rear Adm. Guido Valdes, Naval Medical Forces Pacific commander and Defense Health Network Pacific Rim director with oversight of the MTF and NMRTC, talked about the importance of this meeting and shared his thoughts about the future of military medicine in Southern California.
“Your two military treatment facilities serve as powerful engines of growth for our Network,” said Valdes. “The proximity of your facilities is a strategic advantage that we're fortunate to have. This is about bringing our capabilities together, fostering cooperation, and strengthening mutual support. As we continue to mature our Network and our NMRTCs move out on expeditionary medicine, I'm very optimistic about our ability to deliver both superior health care and enhanced readiness.”
As the conference concluded, Adriano told the San Diego and Camp Pendleton teams that they were going to develop best practices and push them out to the other DHA Networks so “we can all work smarter, not harder.”
She added, “We are the tip of the spear; a medically ready force responsible for the exceptional, patient-centered care that we deliver in our military treatment facilities and that we provide to our warfighters when we deploy, anytime, anywhere, always.”
The mission of NMCSD is to prepare service members to deploy in support of operational forces, deliver high quality health care services, and shape the future of military medicine through education, training, and research. NMCSD employs more than 5,000 active-duty military personnel, civilians and contractors in southern California to provide patients with world-class care. Anchored in Excellence, Committed to Health!
(U.S. Navy story by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class James R. Mitchell)