Summer Internship: Mercy Hospital Ada

By: Teresa Salaway
For the last six weeks, I have been interning at Mercy Hospital Ada in Ada, Oklahoma. Mercy Hospital Ada is part of the West region of Mercy health system. Based out of St. Louis, Mercy is the fifth largest Catholic health system in the US, consisting of 46 hospitals, over 700 clinics, and 40,000 co-workers across Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The system also has outreach ministries in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Mercy was founded by the Sisters of Mercy in 1986, and today, Mercy is the only health system that is solely sponsored by the Religious Sisters of Mercy.

For system-level exposure, I travel to Oklahoma City every other week with my preceptor, Lori Wightman, President of Mercy Hospital Ada. There, we meet with other senior leaders of the West region to discuss broad system-level challenges and opportunities, and from these meetings, I have gained great insight into the inner-workings of a large health system.


 At Mercy Hospital Ada, I have also had the opportunity to participate in many meetings and training sessions, most recently undergoing EMTALA training. While I am working on a range of projects, my main projects include developing a business case for a new outpatient service, analyzing alternative funding options for the ambulance service, organizing community ethics forums on end-of-life decision-making, devising an employee engagement plan, and calculating the operating margin for surgery cases performed during block time compared to those performed using the on-call team. Aside from working on these projects, I have shadowed co-workers in various departments, spending time in food service, housekeeping, surgery, the cath lab, and Mercy Clinics.


Outside of work this week, I volunteered at the Relay for Life with some of my co-workers. In the upcoming weeks, I am looking forward to traveling to other cities in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas. Most of all, though, I have enjoyed the friendly, welcoming culture here in Oklahoma. I have found my internship experience to be extremely rewarding so far, and I look forward to the second half of my internship.

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