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Murdock stepping away from Trinity job

STEUBENVILLE — As he prepares to take on a new role in the community outside Trinity Health System for the first time in 40 years, Keith Murdock looked back on the career he started straight out of Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1978.

Murdock, speaking from his office at Trinity Medical Center East, where he worked his entire time with the hospital system, beginning when it was Ohio Valley Hospital, recalled Lew Musso, director of human relations for OVH interviewing him during a visit to IUP. Murdock was invited to an on-site interview at the hospital.

“I grew up in Pittsburgh and I had no idea where Steubenville was. I knew I’d have to drive across the city and across the western end of the state and across West Virginia and into Ohio. So, I left about three hours before my appointment and ended up sitting in the lobby at Ohio Valley Hospital for about two hours,” he recalled with a smile.

Murdock worked his last day in the office Friday. He is the incoming president of the Steubenville Rotary Club and has been active in many community organizations, including the United Way and the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce.

Murdock, who majored in communications and education with minors in media and literature, started as Ohio Valley Hospital’s coordinator of education and training. That meant helping physicians who were going to be making presentations by preparing slides and getting them in order into the carousel on the projector — there were no PowerPoint presentations because widespread use of personal computers still was years away.

“The slides were mostly words, and I’d have to prepare them by putting rub-on letters onto graph paper and ironing them flat and photographing them. I probably made 100,000 slides in my life,” he said.

He was involved with everything from Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital reviews to training employees on new phone systems.

“We had to train on how to use these new phones that had a hold feature on them. It was my first time training people and we had a manager who quit because she said she just couldn’t learn how to use it. I felt really bad,” Murdock recounted.

In the days before big organizations developed internal information technology departments, Murdock had the first desktop computer in the building — “an old 286”— in the days when the first computer systems in the hospital were installed for admissions and finances. Again, he had to train employees on how to use them, meaning he had to learn to use them.

He got a kind of baptism by fire, starting on his job in July and being laid off when the Ohio Nurses Association local at OVH went on strike in December 1978. He was teaching photography part-time at the Jefferson County Joint Vocational School, which he continued to do for a number of years, so he was able to pay his bills, with help from his parents. He also worked through college and his first two years at OVH as a summer raft guide on the rapids at Ohiopyle in Western Pennsylvania. He’d work through the week here, go to Ohiopyle for the weekend, run the river Saturday and Sunday and be back for work Monday morning.

He became public relations director when former Director George Kehrer committed a public suicide in the hospital’s parking garage in 1987. Murdock said he still works in Kehrer’s office, with the same office fixtures that were there then.

“I still feel him in here,” he said. Murdock said while most of the hospital administration moved to Trinity Medical Center West, he remained at East, where Musso and former hospital President Fred Brower’s offices remained.

“There just wasn’t room for all of us at West,” he said. “Then they retired and now I’m the last one here.” Again, technology allowed that to happen, with the ability to stay in touch through cell phones and to access his desktop computer from anywhere.

Technology didn’t just change office culture during his nearly 40 years at the hospital.

“When I first started, there were 386 beds at Ohio Valley Hospital and I remember days that we had to put patients in the hall because all the rooms were filled. Technology came along and the length of stay reduced, the reasons for admissions were reduced,” he said. He recalled there never being a bed available in pediatrics, but it’s often open now.

“Pediatrics had 26 beds when I started. Back then, it was a three-day stay to take out tonsils. Now, it’s an outpatient procedure,” he said. Murdock said a change in technique where blood vessels are cauterized as the tonsils are removed made the procedure less likely to produce nausea in patients who used to swallow a lot of blood.

Gall bladder removal went from a weeklong stay to three hours as an outpatient procedure.

With the changes hitting health care, officials at St. John Medical Center and Ohio Valley Hospital officials started discussing a merger.

“I knew about it long before anyone else, and it was the hardest thing keeping the secret. Talks began in 1993 and we announced it in 1995. I remember walking into St. John Medical Center for the first time in 1994 for a meeting and all eyes were on me, wondering why I was there,” he said. “It never really got out until the day before we announced and the administration had a meeting with the three unions we had at the time. Someone called the TV station the night before and the news spread like wildfire.

“The affiliation was a really exciting time. We realized it would be a good thing for the community, although we got a lot of pushback,” Murdock said. “Without it, there would be no heart center here, no cancer center and all the technology that we have. We were battling each other for who would have the nicest CT machine for $1 million. We weren’t being good stewards with the health care dollars we had available to us. We understood this would be the best thing for the community.”

“Health care has changed so much in the 40 years I’ve been here, and a lot of that is for the better. Unfortunately, health care is too expensive and there are a lot of reasons for that, but the people making money aren’t the people working at Trinity Health System,” Murdock said. “It’s the people making the machines, manufacturing the pharmaceuticals. That’s why it got so expensive.”

Further, Murdock added, the litigious society in the U.S. has added to expenses.

“Early in my public relations days, I handled complaints by calling a person, apologizing if we made a mistake and asking what they’d like us to do. Now, it’s all such a process. It’s not a personal apology and an explanation. It’s all carried out in the courts,” he said. “I’ve been through two nurses strikes and a contract extension, the affiliation between the two hospitals and when I look back, I wonder how I ever got through all of that?”

He recalled a letters to the editor war about the length of time waiting for service at the emergency room after the service was combined at West and the East ER closed. He said the delays were largely caused by what people were visiting the ER to have done, including colds and headaches. Those patients got delayed while accident victims and more serious cases went first.

“We didn’t have enough primary care physicians at the time for people to visit to be treated, so people were using the emergency room as a doctor’s office,” he said.

Trinity developed its Express Care clinics around the area to alleviate that. The latest one will be opening in July in Cadiz.

Another complaint about the moving of ER services to West was that it would be too far for people to go.

Murdock said it was history repeating itself. Ohio Valley Hospital opened in 1912 in the old Lacey Hotel on High Street, about where the Jefferson County jail is located, when the fundraising campaign to build a new hospital took place. The Women’s Advisory Board managed to raise $100,000 in 17 days to build the hospital on the bluff at the south end of Pleasant Heights. Many thought the hospital was too far from downtown, and with many emergency room patients coming from injuries in the steel mill, there was a worry the hospital was too far away. A horse and carriage was timed, revealing the journey to OVH was 3 and a half minutes.

“And all those years later, people were saying it was too far to go to West,” he said.

“People still call them Ohio Valley Hospital and St. John Medical Center. I asked Fred Brower when that will stop. He said it will be when the last person who remembers either one of them is dead and gone. People still call the TV station WSTV-TV. At least the Herald-Star has always been the Herald-Star in our time,” Murdock said.

“I remember having to hand deliver news releases to the newsroom, and advertisements. We made them on paper with rub-off letters and other archaic techniques and we’d deliver them. I remember going to Tri-State Printing and the Herald-Star every day, driving downtown, parking in Richard Pflug’s private lot at Tri-State and walking to the Intelligencer office when it was across from where Froehlich’s is now, getting my film developed at the mezzanine of The Hub, buying those ruboff letters by the case at Borden’s and Irwin’s and then driving to the Herald-Star. I’d pick up stuff for other departments, too,” Murdock recalled.

He remembered the days of the OVH Christmas parties for all employees. They were expected to come in three 20-minute shifts during the lunch hour. Free gifts would be gathered from businesses all over town and the hospital would buy a grand prize, a 19-inch color TV. Murdock marvels at how low the turnover in the presidency at OVH was, with nearly 40 years under Fred Brower coming on the heels of 45 years of leadership by George Byrum.

Murdock recalled not long after beginning his work at the hospital receiving a call from Byrum one rainy afternoon.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this will probably be some big project,'” Murdock said.

It wasn’t.

Byrum wanted Murdock to clear pine needles from a drain grate in a courtyard between the executive offices and the entrance wing of the hospital.

“I was soaked to the bone. That was my first big project for Mr. Byrum,” he said.

He remembered first meeting Brower as Musso was showing him around.

“Fred looked me up and down and asked, ‘Can you dunk?'” The tall Murdock said yes, and became part of the basketball team that played regularly in the OVH gym.

Murdock said a fun duty he’s done for 40 years is photographing the New Year’s baby. He remembered one year a woman had twins, one born at 11:59 p.m. and the other at 12:03 a.m.

“There was a controversy over whether our clocks were synced right, so we got clocks that were automatically synced with the Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colo.,” he said. “All our clocks have exactly the right time.”

Murdock will undertake a new role in the community, but he said he’ll miss the people at the hospitals.

“I could walk through this building and I knew everybody’s name, about their family. And I’ve been to more funeral visitations for employees and their families and people in the community. There were times I’d go to Mosti’s and I’d go to both viewing rooms. I’ve averaged 40 visitations for 40 years now, when someone’s mother or a retiree or someone in the community dies. I’ve always felt strongly that we have to show sympathy and support for families at that time. You remember who showed up at your families wake,” Murdock said.

“I truly miss Fred and Lew and Frank Toth and George Caddick and the people I worked with years ago.

“But I’m not leaving the area. I’m staying in my house and finding something else to do. When I go to West Mifflin now, I don’t even recognize the place. Pittsburgh is not my home anymore. Steubenville is home,” he concluded.

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