Our People - SSM Health Care

The Nice Guy
It started with cows.
At age 12, Carl Dodd began spending his
summers living and working on farms near his
hometown of Monticello, Wis. The cash he and
his two brothers earned on the farms paid for
their clothes and school supplies and provided
spending money for the year. So Carl rose at 5
a.m. daily, milked the cows, baled hay, drove a
combine through the oat fields, planted, performed
other chores and finished about 7 p.m.
by milking the cows again.
His education continued behind a bar.
Dodd’s parents owned a bar and restaurant in Carl Dodd
Monticello (population 800) but with eight bars
in the community, competition was fierce and money scarce. “The
hours were 8 a.m. until midnight, seven days a week,” he said. “In
the 20 years my parents owned it, they must have aged 60 years.
We were dirt poor.”
At 16, he began cooking and tending bar in his parents’ business,
listening to the triumphs and troubles of friends and neighbors
sitting on the barstools. “You knew everybody and you heard everything
about them,” Dodd said.
By age 19, Dodd was in Viet Nam (1970-71) patrolling the
Mekong Delta in a boat. Slowly motoring at night through canals
that were barely 20 feet wide and thickly lined with vegetation,
he came under fire 47 times during his tour of duty. He said, with
a hint of humor, “Hopefully, it made me a better person.”
After returning from Viet Nam, he moved to Madison, worked
three years as a private detective, and then became a bill collector.
The Giver
“Never lose a chance to say a
kind word.”
One doesn’t have to spend
much time with Amy Merten
to realize that this phrase inscribed
on her office wall is
more than a decoration. It is
clear that, for the cardiology
supervisor at the Centralia,
Ill., campus of St. Mary’s
Good Samaritan Inc., kindness
is a way of life. Merten’s Amy Merten
colleagues know her as a
happy, easy presence – quick to give a smile or lend a hand.
When she walks through the halls of her department or the
hospital, she cheerfully greets everyone she meets and shares
laughs and hugs with patients who are regular visitors to cardiac
rehabilitation.
“I didn’t look forward to my day,” Dodd said.
“We tried to collect money from people and,
if we couldn’t do that, we sued them.”
Dodd then joined St. Mary’s as a patient account
collector, with the word “collector” later
changed to “advisor” because there was a
marked difference between the way St. Mary’s
handled billing and the way Dodd’s previous
agency did. “We spend more time providing financial
assistance to patients than we do collecting,”
he said.
Dodd listens to patients and determines
their financial status. Many of the patients are
embarrassed, angry, and frightened, holding a
medical bill they cannot pay with the added
strain of their own ailment or the illness of a
loved one. They are a short step away from losing everything and
bracing for more threats, when they hear Dodd say “let’s see what
we can work out.” In most cases, the bill is written off when Dodd
discovers their income level is too low. St. Mary’s wrote off $14
million in bills in 2009 and set up payment plans for other patients.
Relief often dissolves into tears.
“Financial assistance is the best part of my job,” Dodd said.
“We’re doing people a service, and we have so many ways to help
them. I look forward to coming to work.”
Dodd has found himself in a job, where his experiences with
poverty, hard work, listening to people, understanding fear, and
what it’s like to have few options, have come together in the
most important word he associates with his job: “compassion.”
“You have to put yourself in the shoes of other people who
are doing the best they can,” he said.
What’s her secret
“I enjoy what I do,” Merten says. “For as long as I can remember,
I’ve wanted to be a nurse. I’ve always known that I want to help
people. There’s not a day that I get up in the morning that I don’t
want to come to work.”
For 24 years she’s felt this way. Merten began her career at
St. Mary’s Good Samaritan in 1986 on the surgical unit. She
quickly moved to the intensive care unit where she worked for
12 years. The last dozen years have been dedicated to cardiology.
In each of her roles at St. Mary’s Good Samaritan, Merten has
been defined by her desire to help others, both her patients and
her coworkers. She considers her six years of service on the
hospital’s mission team to be some of her most rewarding work,
especially her membership on the subcommittee for the Spirit
Fund. This fund distributes thousands of employee-contributed
dollars each year to colleagues who are facing personal crises.
“I was brought up in a very loving, Christian home. I was
taught to treat people as I want to be treated,” Merten said.
“I’ve been blessed in many ways in my life and I try to extend
the same grace and blessings to others.”
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