ETNA — Jim Varnum came to Hanover in 1978 to lead Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital on Maynard Street.
By the time he retired in 2006, the president was overseeing operations at the much larger Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, had integrated services between the hospital, Hitchcock Clinic and Dartmouth Medical School, overseen the launch of programs including the Dartmouth Hitchcock Advanced Response Team, and Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth and built relationships with other area institutions, setting the foundation for the Dartmouth Health of today.
“I’ve enjoyed — almost — every minute,” Varnum told the Valley News at the end of his nearly 30-year tenure.
His impact on healthcare in the region continued beyond his 2006 retirement. Varnum stayed involved in the healthcare and nonprofit systems. He served on boards and committees including for the American Hospital Association. In the 2010s, Varnum served as chair of then-Gov. Maggie Hassan’s special commission to study Medicaid expansion.
Varnum, of Etna, died at 85 at the Jack Byrne Center on May 26 after years of battling Parkinson’s disease.
A giant in the Dartmouth Health story, Varnum is perhaps best remembered as someone who saw relationship building and human connection as essential to the institution’s success.
“He was quiet in his leadership and never felt the need to be the main event,” said Susan Reeves, who worked under Varnum from 1980 to 2006. “He was the epitome of a servant leader.”
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1940, Varnum graduated from Dartmouth College in 1962 and received a master’s degree in Hospital Administration from the University of Michigan in 1964. While in Michigan, Varnum also met his future wife, Cindy, who survives him along with their two children, Susan and Ken.
Varnum served as superintendent of the University of Wisconsin teaching hospital in Madison and chief administrator of the University of Washington Hospital in Seattle before coming to Hanover.
From ‘vision’ to reality
Even in his earliest days in the Upper Valley, Varnum had a “vision” of bringing together the then separate hospital, Hitchcock Clinic and Dartmouth Medical School, said Paul Gardent who started at the hospital in 1979 and rose through the rank’s to become Varnum’s No. 2 as executive vice president.
Varnum relied on his patience, persistence and relationship-building to execute big ideas such as bringing the three institutions together, even as the groups didn’t always see eye to eye, Gardent said.
“I think the first thing in Jim’s mind was how do I bring people along on this to accept and to go along with the idea, and if it takes a couple of years then that’s what it’ll take,” Gardent said.
Bringing the three organizations together was something of a “prelude” to building DHMC in Lebanon, Gardent said.
Varnum himself considered the sprawling academic medical center, which has become the flagship of the Dartmouth Health system, the “pinnacle” of his career in health care, he told the Valley News upon his retirement in 2006.
Building the medical center took time and planning. Organizing the relocation of patients and supplies from Hanover to Lebanon began about three years before the October 1991 move, said Reeves, who directed the effort.
Reeves started at Mary Hitchcock as a nurse in 1980, and later worked in Varnum’s office.
Organizing the move was one of the first opportunities Reeves had to work closely with Varnum, she said. As the big day drew closer, it became apparent to the nurse that she was going to have to be in charge of decision-making throughout the day.
Reeves was nervous to tell the president that he needed to hand over the reins for the day.
“As usual, he said, ‘Of course,(…) you tell me what you want me to do’, ” Reeves recalled, noting that years later the pair laughed that she had been so nervous about the request.
On the day of the move, Varnum stood at the door of the new medical center and welcomed the first patient to the facility with “a big smile on his face,” Gardent said.
People person
Varnum was often referred to as “the people’s president,” Reeves recalled.
“Everybody who worked at Mary Hitchcock Hospital knew Jim,” she added.
As president, Varnum made it a habit to meet every employee, make rounds at the hospital on days, nights and weekends, attend every retirement party and career-milestone celebration he could and write personal notes to celebrate accomplishments big and small.
Reeves still has a collection of more than a dozen notes written on Varnum’s stationary in his “very distinctive” handwriting.
She recalled receiving notes after organizing the move, but noted that hospital staff might receive a personal note from Varnum for any kind of accomplishment such as if a patient had shared their appreciation for a provider by name.
Some nights, Varnum and Gardent would do “ice cream rounds” at midnight, bringing treats around to staff working the night shift.
“Jim loved scooping ice cream and talking with the staff and interacting with them,” Gardent recalled. “It’s a little quieter at midnight, or whenever in the night, and so he could spend more time talking.”
He always attended dinners held to recognize employees’ years of service and retirement parties.
“I think that he wanted everyone in the organization to feel part of trying to improve health for people in the community that we were serving,” said Gardent. “He treated everyone with respect no matter what their position was.”
Famously, Varnum refused to use an allocated parking space and instead parked at satellite lots and rode the shuttle bus to the hospital alongside staff, despite being one of the people who came and went most often from the facility.
“He sits on the bus and talks to you. It’s quite amazing,” Kit Hood, a nurse recruiter at DHMC, told the Valley News upon Varnum’s retirement in 2006.
Another DHMC employee, Randy White, who worked in computer services, said in a retirement video cited by the Valley News in 2006 that he “love(d)” Varnum because he was a “regular guy” who “rides the bus with the rest of us.”
For Varnum, being personable and getting to know patients and staff was essential to running a good hospital for the wider community.
“If you want patients and families to feel respected, then the staff all need to feel respected and Jim conveyed that respect for everyone,” Gardent said.
To the president, it was the people who made the institution.
“The building served us well for 98 years and it touched thousands of lives,” Varnum said in a 1995 speech delivered the day Mary Hitchcock Hospital, which opened in May 1893, was demolished. “(…) The staff is the life and soul of any building and that continues.”
‘Master’ of collaboration
Varnum served as a mentor both inside the walls of Mary Hitchcock Hospital and outside.
“He wouldn’t micro-manage,” Gardent said. “He was clear on what he expected, particularly around the values and things, but he gave people the room to develop their own accomplishments while at the same time mentoring them.”
After seeing through the move from Hanover to Lebanon, Varnum turned much of his attention outward to collaborating with other hospitals. He created the Hitchcock Alliance, a precursor to the Dartmouth Health of today that focused more on shared resources and ideas than organizational oversight.
Deanna Howard was CEO of Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital in Colebrook, N.H., beginning in the 1980s. The hospital was one of the first to join Varnum’s alliance.
When working with Howard, Varnum was “very curious and supportive” and always wanted to know how things were going and how the larger hospital might be able to support the smaller.
Varnum was a “real master” at collaborating with other health organizations, Reeves recalled.
“He was like a tractor beam: He could bring organizations that traditionally would have been competing together to find issues that were common,” she said.
One of the secrets to Varnum’s success was always prioritizing face-to-face meetings.
Bruce King worked in regional development for Varnum before later serving as president and CEO of New London Hospital. He was often in the passenger seat with Varnum making the two and a half hour drive from Lebanon to Colebrook.
It was important to Varnum to always meet with partners face to face and he never entered a room with a mindset of taking over. Varnum was very aware that “these small communities have fierce loyalty” to their local institutions and tried to focus on ideas like how to reduce costs and share ideas, purchasing or other “backroom functions,” King said.
“He was always looking for a solution,” King said.
Howard later came to work for Dartmouth directly under Varnum’s leadership. He valued face to face time with his own staff as much as with hospital partners and regularly held one-on-one meetings with them, she said.
“In future years, I often saw that was a place for senior leaders to save time (…) but boy he never did,” Howard said. “If you had a one-on-one meeting he was committed to that.”
In her own leadership in later years, Howard tried to prioritize meetings with her staff and face-time with colleagues and partners. For all of Varnum’s senior leadership team, the president was a mentor.
His calm and collaborative nature were inspiring to the crew who all went on to be senior leaders themselves and to incorporate Varnum’s practices and lessons into their own careers.
“There were plenty of opportunities to be frustrated or potentially angry or just exasperated at whatever the issue of the day was,” Reeves said. “And he was just as even-keeled as they come, and so to say that I had never seen a healthcare leader angry, frustrated or exasperated is really an amazing thing.”
King credits Varnum with always supporting his career growth and often in later years would think “WWJD,” ‘what would Jim do.”
Howard recalls serving on boards with Varnum after his retirement, including one group Varnum chaired that was “struggling a bit.”
“‘I remember saying ‘Oh, Jim this is going to be hard,'” Howard said. “He said, ‘I think we can help, Deanna. I think we can help.”
