Chief Nursing Officer Pat Samples to Retire from EPH
After serving as the Chief Nursing Officer at Estes Park Health for more than five years, Pat Samples has decided to retire to spend more time with her family in Eaton and be closer to her extended family in eastern Colorado.
Samples, who is a registered nurse and holds a master’s degree in nursing leadership in health care systems, started at EPH in April 2020 during the early and uncertain times of the COVID pandemic.
“I stepped into the doors of Estes Park Health right at the beginning of COVID,” said Samples. “I took the hospital through COVID, finding ways to take care of COVID patients and our small mountain community when we didn’t have a precedent to follow.”
Just four months later, the Cameron Peak Fire started north of Rocky Mountain National Park and Samples had another potential crisis to manage. It wasn’t the Cameron Peak fire, however, that brought the need for a total evacuation of the hospital on Oct. 22, 2020. Instead, a fire that started west of Grand Lake, Colo., burned more than 100,000 acres in one day and jumped the Continental Divide on the evening of Oct. 21, burning a direct path towards Estes Park.
“We were incident command for the Cameron Peak fire but then came the East Troublesome fire,” said Samples. “We rallied together to get our patients evacuated safely to Greeley without any injuries or deaths.”
After the challenges of 2020, Samples stepped up to the plate to improve the processes and services at Estes Park Health, the role she was hired to do but couldn’t start until more than a year into her tenure thanks to the outside forces impacting health care in Estes Valley.
Her goals were simple: elevate the clinical level, encourage leaders to get involved and deliver best practices, all accomplishments she feels her and her team have delivered on at EPH.
In her short time at the hospital, Samples has led teams that have introduced the sleep lab, infusion clinic and cardiac rehabilitation services. The pharmacy has been expanded to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The operating room team, which was 100% staffed by temporary health care travelers in 2020, is now 100% staffed by full-time employees, saving the hospital significant personnel costs. And under her leadership, Estes Park Health improved the hospital’s patient care scorecard to reflect better quality and reworked the lab to a 99% rating on their annual survey.
“Since I previously worked in a large health care system, I knew how to work better together with UCHealth,” said Samples. “That meant I knew how to reach UCHealth and incorporate their services into our existing standards of care.”
As a result, Samples rebuilt and reworked the infusion and chemotherapy clinics in partnership with UCHealth so Estes Valley residents could now receive this care in Estes Park and avoid a long drive to the valley.
With the upcoming UCHealth affiliation, however, Samples feels she has put the hospital on the right path to integrate into the processes of the larger health care system.
“I feel like it is the right time to pass the baton to the next generation of nursing and health care leadership as we navigate through this UCHealth transition,” said Samples, visibly emotional about her crossroads in life. “The hospital is on the right path with this affiliation, but I must focus on my family and watch the hospital’s success and continued transformation from afar.”
EPH has started a search for Samples’ replacement, stating that they are looking at internal candidates as well as the opportunity to possibly start the integration with UCHealth with a member of their team. An interim chief nursing officer will be appointed while the hospital searches for a permanent replacement.