Pam Beitlich started her medical career as a cardiac nurse for Sarasota Memorial Health Care System in 1981, before becoming director of Women and Children's Services.
In the latter role, she oversaw Labor and Delivery, the Mother-Baby Unit, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and Pediatrics, along with other responsibilities. She actually gave birth to her own three children at SMH.
Now retired, Beitlich was elected to the Sarasota County Public Hospital Board in November of 2024.
“I feel this tremendous responsibility to be part of… overseeing this $2.2 billion health care system,” she said. “My focus used to be somewhat smaller where now I just want to make sure we're doing the right things for… 100 years to come.”
WUSF spoke to Beitlich as part of Women's History Month.
“There's really nothing that a woman can't do today. I think we're kind of known for tenacity and perseverance,” she said. “A big part of my personality is, ‘Oh yeah, we can do this. Watch me.’”
The following is an edited transcript of that interview, in which she talks about her early career when women typically were nurses while men were physicians.
But first, Beitlich gives us some history she read in a book released for SMH's centennial this year on the women who founded Sarasota Memorial.
Founding mothers
In the original days of the community, the men were bringing people here. They were the businessmen out there, the big boom of getting all these people that moved to Sarasota.
And the women, though, were on the other side of, ‘Wait a minute, we need a hospital.’ Started all the fundraising for the first hospital that we had almost 100 years ago, raised the $40,000… to build this 32-bed hospital.
I think that's just incredibly impressive. Helen Kramer is now another one of my idols. After reading all the history, she was one of the first directors of nursing. And it's kind of hard to explain that: how do you meld the nursing side, the physician side and then the administrative side too — the leadership arm?
Technical difficulties
So much has transpired and changed and evolved, so part of what happened during the ‘80s, the ‘90s was a very tumultuous time.
We had so much technology coming in, which SMH has always been on the front end of that, so we started electronic medical record. We were cutting-edge trailblazers, and that was such a cultural shift from pen and paper, a chart.
As all that evolved, we moved from taking physician orders. For example, a doctor could call me on the phone or see me in the hall and say, ‘Give me a doctor's order,’ right there.
We moved from that to computerized physician order entry, which means the physicians had to enter all their orders. To say that that was a big change for our physicians would be an understatement. And it was just a lot for them to say, ‘Why do I have to go in the computer and enter? Why do I have to do that?’
We had physician champions that were so helpful. I mean, not everybody was like this, but you might have a few physicians that would maybe be throwing a little bit of a fit at the nurse's station over entering their orders.
And often it fell to the nurse of, ‘Why do I have to do this?’ You know, it was this confrontation. So, if that ever happened, we developed this little code that we had… a code where we kind of say something on the loudspeaker, and all the nurses would come up to the desk, the nurses’ station, and just stand around that physician and look at him, if he was creating a scene.
And it's amazing how little things like that can really say, ‘Hey, we're here, and we all need to work together and do this as a team.’
Her calling
And as I kind of thought back on my career here, we went through this period of… the whole AIDS epidemic. Nobody knew what in the world was going on.
But then we were hit with, certainly COVID, which... was such a traumatic time for every health care professional everywhere.
You literally came in and took care of complete strangers, putting your own life in jeopardy. So much went through all of those times of, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I mean, this is a lot.
I mean, I could be working in retail somewhere, I don't know. But health care, I think it does become really almost a calling, because it's very challenging, but it's also got this whole side of being so incredibly rewarding.
Where else can you save a patient's life? Where else can you say that what I did today was I really made a huge difference. I think that's what always kept me coming back.
