LWRMC chief nursing officer leads with empathy-first approach

When Judy Young was a 20-year-old rookie nurse at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, fresh out of Manatee Community College, the notion of running the nursing operation for an entire hospital was nowhere on her radar. “It was the furthest thing from my mind,” she says, chuckling at the thought. “I never, ever in a million years would have pictured myself reaching this point. I didn’t even go for my bachelor’s degree. Becoming a manager was not a consideration at all.”

And yet here she finds herself chief nursing officer at Lakewood Ranch Medical Center, where she oversees roughly 400 staff members, 340 of them nurses. LWR Medical Center has 120 beds and is amid a $120 million expansion expected to double capacity. 

It wasn’t as if a lightbulb clicked on for Young, 58, to start clawing her way up to the C-Suite. Her rise in the ranks came more organically. “I just had really great opportunities and mentors that helped me along the way and showed me what it’s like to be a good leader,” she says.

And about that associate’s degree: She has since added a bachelor’s degree in healthcare leadership, an MBA, and another bachelor’s degree in nursing.

Young has been in her current position for 10 years. She came over from Blake Medical Center in west Bradenton, where she served as assistant CNO for four years. Before that, she was in the trenches at Sarasota Memorial, usually in a surgery unit — not as a scrub nurse, but as a clinical nurse responsible for a variety of duties that involved managing the operating room and the overall process. She did stints as a charge nurse and a surgical services director.

Big team

These days, Young handles a heavy load, which she sums up as, “guiding the clinical care here at the hospital for nursing and other clinical areas other than the medical staff.” Her most important role within the job? “I’d say growing the right leaders for the (hospital) areas,” she says. Currently, Young has 10 supervisors who report directly to her. As CNO, she makes sure to get out of her office and into the hospital units, going on rounds, connecting with her charges, talking with staffers in the cafeteria.

She grew up Judy Tittle in a golf neighborhood in an eastern part of Sarasota that bordered rural areas. Her proximity to agriculture was one reason she joined Future Farmers of America, although she didn’t see driving a tractor as part of her future. While at Sarasota High School she served as the organization’s treasurer, and the president during her senior year. “I think I gravitated toward leadership from a very young age,” she says. 

Judy charted her course toward a health care career early on. “I had an aunt who was a nurse and my mom’s cousin was a nurse, so I had good role models,” she says. “I had a cousin a year younger than me with muscular dystrophy, so I saw the care that he needed. I always felt a little bit bad because I could walk and do all of the things, and he couldn’t. So it really taught me empathy at an early age.”

Being a “hometown kind of girl,” Judy had no plans to leave the area, but she did have a plan for her professional life. “I stuck to it,” she says. “I graduated high school at 17, and I was an RN by the time I was 20.”

As Young climbed the management ladder, she often had to balance her continuing studies for advanced degrees with having a husband and two small children. That’s a lot, yet she doesn’t remember being terribly overwhelmed. 

“I kind of learned to do one thing at a time,” she asserts. “There’s always more to do. Sometimes it’s OK not to be ahead of it.”

Step up 

Young occasionally misses doing hands-on nursing, but not the way it happened on Christmas night in 2008. She’d been the director of surgical services at Sarasota Memorial “for a long time” when one of her nurses called in sick. Instead of assigning a replacement, she elected to cover the shift herself. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ve had my Christmas, so why ruin someone else’s?” Young recalls. After all, it was just a simple endoscopic procedure. It didn’t turn out that way. “They had to open the patient up and do a full abdominal surgery,” she recalls. “I was nervous, and it was one of those situations where I had to really grasp some of my roots to get through it.”

It’s unlikely Young will find herself thrust into the OR any time soon. And she’s more apt to spend Christmases with her family. Young has two stepchildren to go along with a daughter and a son, both of whom live in St. Petersburg. Her son and his wife have a 2-year-old daughter named Olive. “They’re close enough to us that we get a lot of Olive time,” she says. 

Young, who lives in Parrish, has another commitment to health care, this one an avocation she shares with her husband of 12 years, Jim. On Saturdays, they volunteer at Nate’s Honor Animal Rescue Center on Lorraine Road in east Manatee County. “Working with animals is one of my passions,” she says. “I guess, in a way, you could see it as me going back to my roots in Future Farmers of America.”