In less than 18 years, Sally Hurt Deitch worked her way up from a 22-year-old staff nurse in an endoscopy department to CEO of one of El Paso’s newest hospitals.
Her interest in health care goes back to her elementary school days, when she almost lost her mother to an autoimmune disease.
Deitch’s mother, Toni Canales Hurt, has idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, a disease that causes low platelet levels and affects the blood’s ability to clot. Deitch was in fifth grade when the family took Hurt out of the hospital for lunch on Mother’s Day. Hurt had no hair because of chemotherapy treatments, she used a walker, and her face was large and round – a side effect of her medications.
GROW A HOSPITAL, TO CARE FOR
PATIENTS … AND TO GIVE BACK
TO THAT COMMUNITY ARE MY
GOALS.”
Sally A. Hurt Deitch
“I remember people staring at her,” Deitch recalled. “I remember being angry and thinking, ‘Stop looking at her,’ and at the same time being fiercely proud and fiercely defiant in wanting to defend her.”
Because of that experience, Deitch knew she wanted to go into a health care field after graduating from Burges High School, but it wasn’t until her freshman year at UTEP that she narrowed down her interests even more. She became fascinated with what her older brother was doing in the UTEP nursing program and decided to follow in his footsteps.
“The hardest thing I had ever done was nursing school,” she said. Her class started with about 70 students, and by the time she graduated, the group had shrunk by about half. From making beds with “hospital corners” and moving patients from a stretcher to giving bed baths and folding washcloths, her education went beyond medical knowledge.
“They (our professors) took us to a whole other level and not only turned us into nurses, but really taught us what a professional was and what it meant to embrace the profession … and know that what you do every day impacts somebody’s life,” she said. “I can never say thank you enough nor explain to them what they instilled in me.”
Deitch earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1990 and a Master of Science in Nursing in 1994. Her first job was at Sun Towers in 1990, later called Columbia Medical Center and now Las Palmas Medical Center, as a staff nurse in endoscopy and the operating room. As a young, single, energetic nurse in her early 20s, Deitch had the drive to learn as much as she could.
“By the end of my first year, I had rewritten [my boss’s] policies and procedures, I was doing her payroll, I was doing the scheduling, I’d done the operational budget, the capital budget; I was doing all these things and, honestly, it was because I didn’t know any better,” Deitch said.
When her boss announced her retirement, the doctors advocated for Deitch to fill in as the director of endoscopy services and the operating room, Deitch recalled. The CEO at the time was skeptical since she was only 23, but he gave her six months to prove herself, she said.
She did, and she continued to move up the ladder. By 1996, she was chief nursing officer. She moved to Del Sol Medical Center and became chief operating officer before taking a position as chief executive officer at Edmond Medical Center in Edmond, Okla.
Before her 40th birthday, she was recruited back to El Paso to preside over the $150 million project that became Sierra Providence East Medical Center, a 110-bed hospital in far East El Paso. It opened in May 2008 with Deitch as CEO.
“I can remember when [Deitch] was working from a trailer before the hospital opened and how easily she spoke of the challenges of opening a medical center,” recalled Kathleen Curtis, Ph.D., dean of UTEP’s College of Health Sciences and a founding member of the Sierra Providence East Medical Center Governing Board. “She has shown a great ability to pull together a strong team, provide stable leadership, take advantage of the opportunities that have emerged and steadily move toward some very specific goals.”
UTEP honored Deitch with a Gold Nugget Award for the School of Nursing in 2003.
“Sally’s energy, enthusiasm and commitment to health care has provided the platform for her success as a chief executive officer,” said UTEP School of Nursing Dean Elias Provencio-Vasquez, Ph.D. “She continues to make a difference in El Paso and health care in our region.”
When she’s not actively running the hospital, Deitch’s husband, Greg, and their five boys are the focus of her existence, she said.
With a full-time job and a full-time family, Deitch doesn’t have much time to reflect on her success. But when she does, she measures it by the accomplishments of those she has mentored along the way.
“I look at the people that have worked for me and I’ve worked with, and the places they’ve gone and the things that they’ve done, and they far exceed my expectations,” she said.
What’s next on her agenda?
“Another day granted to pursue my passion, to grow a hospital, to care for patients, to see my staff become stronger and stronger leaders, to provide service to the community, and to give back to that community are my goals,” she said. “One day, things may change and another opportunity will present itself, but until that day, I will stay and do what I do.”