Site Administrator

Administrators at NHSC sites are a driving force in keeping desperately needed health care clinics alive and well in health professional shortage areas. Site administrators collaborate with the NHSC in the mutual mission to recruit and retain skilled, dedicated clinicians in a variety of disciplines.

In cooperation with the NHSC, site administrators can attract and attain crucial partnerships in order to provide the full range of patient services, including hospitalization and provision of specialized medicine. An administrator's motivation and dedication to quality patient care, coupled with the NHSC's management and strategic planning experience, add up to an opportunity to build a customized clinical infrastructure to meet a community's individual needs.

Joanne Cochran, Site Administrator
One-Time Nun Finds Second Calling Providing Health Care to the Poor

In a sense, says Joanne Cochran, she's been doing the same thing for most of her life. She has made a habit, throughout her adult life, of being a champion of the poorest people—first, for 15 years as a nun, and subsequently as a health care administrator in small-town Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To friends and colleagues, the tough-talking, compassionate health care administrator is known as a cross between Mother Teresa and Rambo.

Lamenting the lack of well-organized health care for Chambersburg's migrant workers—health care was available in the community, but not accessible to all—Cochran took on the challenge in the mid-1980s to turn health care around for the July-through-December migrant poor. After setting up her Keystone Migrant Health Center, the clinic provided health care to 450 migrants the first year, and 800 the second. By the third year, the flow of patients didn't stop when the migrant season ended—Chambersburg's local indigent residents, including many African-Americans and Hispanics, had heard that Keystone was in town to turn their health care woes around.

In 1995, almost 10 years after Cochran founded Keystone, the health care system became a community health center, which has since grown into a multiclinic provider of care across health specialties—from family practice to dental services to social services to OB-GYN.

We asked Cochran about the NHSC:

What difference has the NHSC made in your community?
As founder, and now CEO and president of the Keystone Health Center, I can say that the National Health Service Corps has saved our hospital and saved our community. I have a significant number of NHSC doctors and dentists, and many have come and put down roots in the community and intend to stay here. They didn't just come to get their loans repaid and then get out.

What difference has the NHSC made in your professional life?
There is a tremendous problem with getting doctors to come to Pennsylvania, and especially to come to a rural community. But after serving their commitment with the NHSC, health professionals will say, "Man, I've got my practice, it's a safe community, the schools are good, and I don't have to worry about my kids as much." And in Chambersburg, doctors are still important people. People are very grateful to have them here.