Andrea McGill-O’Rourke calls it “serendipitous.”
She was helping her son search for a job as a social worker when she happened upon Gifford Medical Center’s Web site, www.giffordmed.org. The hospital was hiring not for a social worker but for a vice president of operations.
“Wait, that’s my job,” McGill-O’Rourke remembers saying.
A Connecticut native who once owned a second home in Vermont, McGill-O’Rourke was living and working in Maine at a job and hospital she greatly enjoyed – Blue Hill Memorial.
She’d been there since 2001 as first its health professions development and career advancement manager, then workforce development director and most recently, since 2005, as its vice president of ancillary and support services – a position similar to Gifford’s vice president of operations.
And while she wasn’t really looking for a change, she was ready for one.
“I loved Maine. I loved the hospital, but I like change,” she says. “I also love Vermont. We had owned a house in Arlington about 15 years ago.”
In fact, McGill-O’Rourke had been coming to Vermont since she was a teenager.
She went on to college in New York, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Ithaca College, and then to Pennsylvania, where she obtained her master’s in social work from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Social Work in Philadelphia. When she completes her dissertation, she will earn a doctorate in higher education leadership from the University of Maine Graduate School of Education in Orono.
Prior to working at Blue Hill, McGill-O’Rourke was director of case management and the employee assistance program at William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich and has worked as a counselor, social worker, consultant and as an adjunct professor at colleges in Maine and Connecticut.
She brought her diverse skill set and years of education to Gifford in October, and has quickly found a medical center that offers the best of both worlds – a small, friendly place with up-to-date facilities and the latest in technology.
Like Gifford, Blue Hill is a Critical Access Hospital. But Gifford’s volume is much higher, McGill-O’Rourke notes. And Gifford’s ability to invest in its facilities through careful financial oversight and planning is obvious.
The hospital, she says, is “a show piece.”
“What I’m really impressed with is Gifford’s connection with the community,” she adds, calling her new employer “very embedded” in the central Vermont communities its serves.
The community McGill-O’Rourke and her husband, Jay, are now calling home is Rochester. Their “blended family” includes four children and a springer spaniel dog named Jo-Jo. In her free time, McGill-O’Rourke enjoys scrabble, backgammon, Netflix, reading, snowshoeing and swimming.