UVM Medical Center announces retirement of Dawn LeBaron

Dawn LeBaron, the University of Vermont Medical Center’s vice president of Hospital Services shared that she will retire at the end of 2020. LeBaron will have been with the UVM Medical Center for 20 years and has been at the center of many of the organization’s significant milestones – including the successful completion and opening of the Miller Building for inpatient care in 2019 and the complex and evolving response to the COVID-19 pandemic this year.

“I’ve truly loved my job and all the people who have been a part of it,” LeBaron said in an email to all staff. “Still, I know it’s time.”

LeBaron is the lead hospital administrator in charge of the teams that build and maintain the environment of care that patients experience, including Facilities Planning, Construction, Real Estate Development, Facilities Management, Nutrition Services, Environmental Services, Security, Parking, and Environmental Health & Safety. She is also the administrative leader for emergency planning and response, ensuring that the organization is prepared to support the community in disasters and emergencies.

“Dawn’s depth of knowledge, her understanding of this organization, and her sense of humor have earned her not only the respect but the admiration of her colleagues,” said UVM Medical Center President and Chief Operating Officer Steve Leffler, MD. “I deeply value her perspective and her leadership, and she will be incredibly missed.”

LeBaron has been a public face of many victories and challenges during her tenure. This spring, she spent hours talking with local reporters about the organization’s preparedness for COVID-19, providing tours of the surge site at UVM’s Patrick Gym, and working with members of the community who wanted to donate space, time and materials, all while leading the organization’s incident command response to the pandemic.

A native Vermonter, LeBaron has spent all of her career in health care. After earning her Bachelor of Arts from Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont, she studied and worked in Massachusetts. Early in her career, she led a variety of support services at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts. After 18 years in Massachusetts, she returned home to Vermont and began working for the UVM Medical Center (Fletcher Allen Healthcare at the time), where she has been ever since.

Sustainability has been at the heart of everyday work for the teams that report to LeBaron. The Nutrition Services team serves locally grown vegetables – some from the hospital’s roof – to patients, visitors and staff; clinical staff perform procedures with reprocessed sterilized medical devices; and the hospital is committed to the ambitious Burlington 2030 project, a private/public partnership to reduce building energy consumption, water use and transportation emissions 50 percent by 2030. On her watch, the organization has received multiple top 25 Environmental Excellence Awards from Practice Greenhealth, as well as a Sustainability Excellence Award from Vizient, Inc.

After serving three terms on the Lund Board of Directors as chair of their Buildings and Grounds Committee, LeBaron now serves on the Board of the Special Services Transportation Association. She is also a fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives and Certified Healthcare Facilities Manager in the American Society for Healthcare Engineering.

LeBaron enjoys many outdoor activities including skiing, hiking, running and boating. She resides in Mallets Bay and enjoys spending time with her family in Woodstock, Vt, where she grew up. In her newfound free time, LeBaron is planning to hold space for discovering new pursuits.

LeBaron will work with Dr. Leffler on a transition plan, the details of which will be shared as the plan evolves. In her email to employees, she shared that she is looking forward to the next few months of doing the work she loves with her colleagues, and thanked everyone for their friendship, spirit and dedication to the patients and families they serve. “You are truly heroes,” she said to the staff. “It’s been an honor to work alongside you.”

About the University of Vermont Medical Center

The University of Vermont Medical Center is a 499-bed tertiary care regional referral center providing advanced care to approximately 1 million residents in Vermont and northern New York. Together with our partners at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont and the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, we are Vermont’s academic medical center. The University of Vermont Medical Center also serves as a community hospital for approximately 150,000 residents in Chittenden and Grand Isle counties.

The University of Vermont Medical Center is a member of The University of Vermont Health Network, an integrated system established to deliver high quality academic medicine to every community we serve.

For more information visit www.UVMHealth.org/MedCenter or visit our Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blog sites at www.UVMHealth.org/MedCenterSocialMedia.