As Kaiser Permanente Oakland’s director of Hospital Rebuild, Kay Stodd, RN, brings collaboration and organization to a new level.

For the past 10 years, Kay Stodd, RN, has been spearheading the rebuilding of and transition to the Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center campus—from planning to move-in.

After focusing on the training, supplies, and support services for the 750 employees and physicians who moved to the new Specialty Medical Office Building on Jan. 6, Stodd is now preparing for the needs of 3,500 providers and staff that will move to the state-of-the-art hospital in July.

It’s an enormous effort that involves familiarizing providers with the layout of their departments, orienting them to new equipment, providing them with the supplies and tools they need to do their jobs, and simulating procedures and patient care. In all, she and 11 project managers will be helping providers and staff move “from their current life to a new life” in the new building.

From Patient Care to Project Management and Operations

A registered nurse, Stodd began her KP career more than 30 years ago as an operating room manager in Orange County. She helped open the Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa facility in 1990, working in both Perioperative Services and hospital administration. In 1997, she joined Kaiser Permanente’s Regional Offices in Oakland as part of the Operational Consulting Group, and in 2003, she was hired as Kaiser Permanente Oakland’s director of Hospital Rebuild.

For Stodd, it’s a natural building progression from a career in patient care to project management and operations.

“I was always organized,” she said, “and moving from a good operating room to what I do now was very natural, since so much of what I did every day in the operating room was project management.”

Stodd made her Oakland debut with the planning and execution of the first phase of the KP campus rebuild: the design, construction, and the move to the Broadway Medical Office Building and Cancer Center.

Phase Two, the hospital and Specialty Medical Office Building, involved similar challenges, but on a scale that is larger and more complex. Both staff members and patients will be moving.

Learning from Other Kaiser Permanente Hospital Openings

To prepare for this, Stodd said she has visited and studied every Kaiser Permanente hospital that has opened in the last 5 years “to pick everyone’s brain about the lessons they have learned, so that we can take safe care of our patients as we move them across the street.”

In her role as coordinator, integrator, and liaison-in-chief, Stodd represents Kaiser Permanente department managers and physicians to the architects, construction companies, and the construction management team from Kaiser Permanente’s National Facilities Services.

“My job is to see that, to the degree possible, the departments get what functionally works for them in their new space,” she said. “I ask them how their department functions and what their needs are… and then we translate that into information about space and equipment that we relay to the architects.”

For 10 years, with every building that has been constructed or remodeled in Oakland, Stodd has facilitated the design process, helping users articulate their needs and making sure that architects have understood and responded.

In preparation for the Oakland hospital opening this summer, Stodd is overseeing everything from work flow planning to regulatory issues.

“Documenting everything will be important, after people have been functioning awhile,” she said. “We want to share our experiences so that others can learn from them.”

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