This job was facilitated by Green Card
Fund Regional Center
David Wanger
Executive Director
Green Valley Hospital
Green Valley, Ariz.
“I came to Green Valley about 16 months ago and essentially
what I heard from everybody was that they were in constant
need of a hospital,” Wanger said.
Green Valley residents were travelling 45 minutes to an hour
to Tucson to get the care they needed, spending an average of
$350 million in gross charges every year, Wanger said. The
Green Valley demographic, which has an average age of 71,
needed a much closer option than Tucson.
Wanger’s passion for running hospitals starts with giving
people the care that they deserve, he said. That itself must
begin with his way of doing things.
“I was on the ground by myself, really, for about 16 months,”
he said about getting the hospital up and running. “We didn’t
hire anyone until about five or six months ago.”
Getting the hospital running by himself allowed Wanger to
create a unique culture. Rather than grappling with an existing
way of doing things, he got to start from scratch.
David Wanger has been running hospitals for 34 years. He
started off as a single-day volunteer when he was a teenager,
shadowing a family friend who was the director of a hospital.
That day turned into an entire summer, and that summer
blossomed into a career.
Growing up, Wanger’s father pushed him into the field,
albeit in a roundabout fashion.
“Back then, we didn’t question our parents,” Wanger
laughed. “My father put me in touch with a friend of the family, who was a hospital administrator, and I spent an afternoon
with him. I wound up spending the whole summer with him
as a volunteer.”
Wanger’s career has taken him to hospitals across the country in several different capacities. Currently he is the executive
director of Green Valley Hospital in Green Valley, Arizona, an
EB-5 project developed by the locally-based Green Card Fund.
“I’m not much for just going in and operating on someone
else’s culture,” Wanger said. “What I loved about this place
was having a blank canvas. As long as you stay within the letter
of the law, you can paint almost any picture you want. My
guess is we’re about to paint a Rembrandt here—especially if
you hire the right people, and I believe we have.”
The most important thing for him, he said, was seeing the
community’s reaction to finally having a place to get the care
they need.
“I want to do the right thing, not just the profitable thing,
for the community,” Wanger added. “We’ll be setting up a
community advisory board soon. We also have 240 or so volunteers signed up. We have more volunteers than employees
right now.”
That is a testament to the Green Valley community, which
surprises him every day with their enthusiasm, Wanger said.
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