Mercy’s new CEO arrives ready to open next chapter in hospital’s history – The Durango Herald

Josh Neff will officially take office on Tuesday.

Josh Neff says he plans to stay in Durango for a while.

“I’m in Fort Morgan, I don’t have that view,” said the new CEO of CommonSpirit Mercy Hospital, sitting in an executive office Thursday, looking out toward the La Plata Mountains, just hours after arriving in Durango.

In just a few weeks, current CEO Brandon Mencini announced he would start a new job in Oregon in July and CommonSpirit announced that Neff would take over when Mencini leaves on Monday.

Neff’s predecessors each held the position for just under two years.

While Mencini was able to quickly integrate into the community, forging key partnerships and getting involved in the business community, the shock of multiple changes in the CEO’s office can be tough on a community, Neff acknowledged.

That’s one of the downsides of being a high-performing executive in a hospital system: Leadership often takes those people to bigger and more senior positions. Mencini is leaving Mercy now so that doesn’t happen in a few years, when his children are in the middle of high school, he said.

With new leadership at the regional level, Neff hopes to remain in Southwest Colorado permanently.

“I’ve wanted to settle here for a number of years and I’m at a point in my career where I want to make sure I build my own personal legacy,” Neff said. “And I’m at a point where I want to put down roots.”

A native Texan (he asks that this not be held against him) and a former critical care paramedic, Neff comes to the job from Fort Morgan, where he was CEO of St. Elizabeth Hospital. He also serves as CommonSpirit’s vice president for integration and rural health.

If Mencini’s chapter in Mercy’s history books was about the immediate rebound from COVID-19, Neff says hers is about navigating the unknown and maintaining consistency.

“People have different access to care today than they did before the pandemic,” he said. “So I think we have to be diligent in connecting with the community to understand what their needs are and how we as an organization figure out how to meet those needs.”

It’s a goal for the hospital as a whole, he said, as well as for him personally.

Neff describes himself as a people person, a point that bears repeating repeatedly. The relationships that will determine how the hospital adapts to new patient demands won’t be formed in his office, Neff insists. Rather, it’s lunches at the nurses’ station that produce something authentic.

“We want to become a regional resource for care,” he said. “When you’re a resource for care, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re actually providing care, but you’re involved in either connecting people to care or helping people who specialize in a particular type of service succeed and create care pathways.”

That mindset may be one way the hospital is approaching the issue of tubal ligations, Neff suggests.

In April 2023, the Catholic hospital system that owns Mercy decided to stop performing tubal ligations, a procedure that helps prevent unwanted pregnancies at the time of C-sections. The decision was unpopular with many doctors and patients.

Neff said the decision was not made locally.

“We want to be able to provide people with ways to seek out and receive the care they want so they can make their own choices,” he said. “We may not be able to provide all of that, but we can certainly provide some connectivity and make sure we’re working with our partners across the region so people can do that.”

As healthcare workers’ needs adapt to change and patient demands, Neff sees authentic connection as the way forward.

“For me, being a true leader, authentic and transparent, without a mask, has been the secret recipe,” he said.

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