Patients and hospital thrived under his care

RALEIGH -- When the young Dick Myers told his father he planned to be a general surgeon, his father, a small-town pharmacist in Missouri, replied with a wry comment:

"We'll, that's great. All you'll need are nerves of steel, a steady hand and an utter disregard for human life."

Myers went on to abundantly demonstrate the first two qualities, but he has proved hopelessly lacking in the third. During decades of service to Rex Hospital as a top surgeon and institutional leader, Dr. Richard Myers couldn't stop caring about the health of others.

Sometimes, says his wife, Barbara, "he would get up in the middle of the night and walk the floor and worry about his patients."

As a surgeon, he estimates he performed 28,000 operations -- many of them under urgent circumstances. As a leader, he was the first doctor to serve on the Rex Hospital Board of Trustees. He served for 14 years, the last six as chairman.

This month, he stepped down from the board, carrying with him the highest honor the governor can bestow on a North Carolina resident, membership in the Order of the Long Leaf Pine.

As his legacy, Myers leaves thousands of patients who recovered, and a hospital that got better too. This year, Rex was named one of America's 100 best hospitals.

"Dick is a very unique person, one of the most gifted and skilled surgeons, and, at the same time, he has great business acumen as well as strategic vision," says Rex President David Strong. "He has been essential to helping Rex Healthcare become a tremendous organization."

Although free of his board duties, Myers, 68, has no plans to return to surgery. He says he quit his practice "cold turkey" on June 30, 2005, and can't imagine picking up the scalpel on a semi-retired schedule.

"Who would want a part-time surgeon?" he says. "I certainly wouldn't."

Myers was never part time in medicine. He seemed to do two jobs full time. He worked the long hours, the nights and weekends of a general surgeon on call with his practice, the Raleigh Surgical Group Inc., and helped guide the hospital from the top.

One of his most satisfying accomplishments was getting management to listen to the views of doctors.

"The hospital was 100 years old, and I was the first doctor to be on the board," he says. Now there are two doctors among the hospital's 13 board members and other doctors who consult regularly with board members.

Adding a medical perspective to Rex's business decisions has not only improved the level or care, but defused a potential area of friction between the medical staff of the 435-bed hospital and its administration.

"As a board member, he was put in a position of representing the administration when talking to physicians and representing physicians when he was talking to the administration," said Gary Park, president of UNC Hospitals and a previous president of Rex. "He was very good at that. He could see each perspective very well."

'Better off together'

That ability became especially important in 2000 when Rex was acquired by UNC Health Care System. For Rex, it was a big change. The hospital had been on its own since it was founded in 1894 with a bequest from John T. Rex.

Myers says the two institutions are "better off together than they would be apart," but he sought to ensure that the historic Raleigh hospital wouldn't lose its identity with the change.

"He represented the interests of Rex physicians and hospital, that it wasn't going to be taken over by UNC," Park says of Myers, who also served on the UNC Hospitals board. "It was going to fit into the system and its culture, and history would be respected."