This public letter was contributed by candidate for San Benito Health Care District Dr. Parveen Sharma. The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent BenitoLink or other affiliated contributors. Lea este artículo en español aqui.

Being a Hospital Board Member

When I first joined a hospital board, I thought I knew hospitals. I had spent most of my life in them—walking their corridors, answering calls in the middle of the night, standing beside frightened patients and families waiting for news.

But the boardroom was a different kind of hospital. There were no white coats, no monitors beeping, no patient calling from behind a curtain. There were coffee cups, thick packets of reports, and an agenda where a five-minute discussion could easily take half an hour.

We talked about budgets, staffing, infection rates, new equipment, construction—and, always, parking. There were numbers everywhere. But I could never see them as only numbers. A nursing shortage meant an exhausted nurse returning to a patient’s room for the twelfth time that night. A delayed equipment purchase meant a doctor waiting for a machine that should already have been there. A cut that looked sensible on paper might mean a call bell ringing longer, an appointment postponed, or a family waiting for answers that no one had time to give.

As a physician, I had cared for the patient in front of me. I knew the name, the face, the fear in the eyes. As a board member, I had to think about patients whose names I would never know and whose faces I would never see. That was the difference. At the bedside, a decision might change one life. In the boardroom, a decision could affect an entire community.

We did not always agree. Sometimes we argued. Sometimes we went around the same subject until I wondered whether any of us remembered where we had begun. But disagreement was not the danger. The danger was forgetting what all those reports and figures were really about.

A hospital must balance its books. It must pay its staff, keep its doors open and prepare for an uncertain future. But it must never forget why it exists. For the mother waiting outside surgery. For the old man lying awake in a darkened room. For the nurse trying to do more than one person reasonably can. For the family in the hallway, waiting for words that may change their lives forever.

Serving on a hospital board was an honor. But it was never simply a title. It was another way of caring for patients—from farther away, perhaps, without a white coat or a stethoscope—but still with their lives very much in our hands. The patients were never in the boardroom with us. But they belonged at the center of every decision we made.

     –Dr. Parveen Sharma

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