Brandon LaRoche ’20DNP
Growing up, Brandon LaRoche watched his mother work as a nursing assistant in local community hospitals around rural New Hampshire. He, in turn, earned his bachelor’s in nursing, and for ten years he performed bedside care as he’d seen his mother do. And then he returned to school, at Yale, to earn his doctor in nursing practice degree. He saw the potential of working in leadership, of improving systems instead of individuals. But while pursuing and serving in administrative roles—first at Tufts, and then at Winchester Hospital in Massachusetts—“patients remained near and dear to me.”
Now the associate chief nursing officer of inpatient services, nursing resources, and staffing at Winchester Hospital, part of a system that is one of the largest health care employers in the state, LaRoche is “setting the vision and tone for inpatient care,” he says. In practice, this means building community, and removing as many barriers as possible, to allow nurses to simply do their work. “Care and decisions,” he says, “should be made as close to the bedside as possible.”
The work of community building proved especially difficult post-pandemic, as hospitals struggled with nursing shortages and relied heavily on traveling nurses, who might be posted to a hospital for only eight weeks. So LaRoche has focused intensely on staff retention. He has also served as a defender of the work that nurses, every day, show up to do, pairing the humanism of their care with the colder numbers of finance. “The fact is, a lot of people see nursing as an expense because nurses don’t bill for their services,” he says. “But articulating the financial benefits of nursing is one of my core responsibilities.”
Whatever the approach, it seems to be working. For the 20th straight year, Winchester earned an “A” in hospital safety from a health care watchdog called The Leapfrog Group. LaRoche has year 21 in sight.
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