Southern Arizona’s blazing sun is no threat to Holy Cross Hospital’s new chief executive officer Wanona “Winnie” Fritz. Prior to moving to the Southwest, Fritz spent much of her career working in the Middle East. When it comes to the sun and sand Fritz is no stranger.

“I love Arizona. Give me the sun and sand and I‘m happy,” Holy Cross Hospital’s new chief executive officer Wanona “Winnie” Fritz said. “I already feel very much at home here.” Photo / Mary Donnelly

“I love Arizona. Give me the sun and sand and I‘m happy,” said Fritz. “I already feel very much at home here.”

Carondelet Health Network named Fritz as president and CEO of its 25-bed acute-care Nogales hospital, and St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson, where she served as interim CEO for the past three months. Holy Cross Hospital also has a 49-bed, long-term care unit.

Fritz said that most of her 35-year career in health care has been in foreign countries. A farm girl from Illinois, she began a career with lots of travel right after graduating from Army Student Nursing Program at the University of Missouri in 1967 when she was shipped to Viet Nam for a year. As an Army officer for 6 ½ years she learned to fly both fixed-wing planes and helicopters and traveled to Thailand, Germany and Russia.

Fritz ended up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where she managed the “Presidential Suite” set up to treat President Nixon and his staff, members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, high-ranking military officers, and foreign heads of state. It was there that she met King Hussein of Jordan who was in the hospital for a heart condition. Fritz said that Hussein invited her to his country to be a medical consultant. She learned Arabic and Hussein appointed her assistant attorney general and senior consultant to the Royal Palace of Jordan and the 28 hospitals in its Armed Forces and Ministry of Health. She wasin Jordan 17 years.

“Living in Jordan took some adjustment but I went there understanding the traditional role of women in their society,” said Fritz. She said she went to the Middle East understanding that if she was going to accomplish her job she needed to become neutral in gender, neither man nor woman. She said she dressed like a professional woman in pant suits, but presented herself with the confidence of a man. King Hussein commissioned her as a brigadier general in Jordan’s army to give her position some teeth, she said.

Before joining Carondelet, Fritz served as the chief clinical officer and director of international operations for Health Care Corporation of America (HCCA), a Nashville-based organization specializing in international hospital management and professional recruiting in the Middle East and Asia. Part of her job was helping countries assess the health-care needs of their people through population studies to determine what hospitals and clinics should be set up, she said. “I worked 200 nights a year for the past four years (traveling)” she said with a smile.

With pencil and graph paper Fritz draws circles and squares and gets listeners excited about “diagnostic hubs” and hospital plans and Holy Cross‘s role in the big picture. She said that Carondelet’s “20/20 plan” to improve and standardize care in its four hospitals is her goal.

Part of the plan for Holy Cross includes adding a full-time surgeon to the staff in October and opening a medical office for staff physicians near the hospital, said Fritz. In coming years, she said, the hospital will begin a slow rebuilding beginning with modular operating and diagnostic units. Eventually, the main hospital will be razed and a new building constructed on the 90 acre site. “It’s a great time to be in the Carondelet network,” said Fritz.

“We are so lucky to have her as part of our organization,’’ said Carondelet Health Network CEO Ruth Brinkley. “Winnie has provided strong guidance, critical problem solving, operations acumen, team building expertise and positive physician relationship building skills. She also brings a great devotion to the Carondelet mission of advancing the healing ministry of Christ.”

Fritz said she first met Brinkley while working in St. Louis (Missouri) for The Daughters of Charity. “She called me in January and asked if I could envision Tucson as a foreign country? I guess this is about as close as you can get to being in a foreign country so I said I’d give it a try.”

Fritz said that the final push to get her to take the new positions was when the sisters working at St. Mary’s Hospital called her one day while she was serving as interim CEO and said they were “all going to the Grapefruit Tree to bury the statue of St. Joseph and pray that she would stay.”

“What could I say after that?” said Fritz.

Split between the two hospitals, Fritz said that she expects to spend one or two days a week in Nogales but will be available as she is needed. Her days in Nogales usually begin around 4 a.m. and last into the evening, she said. Her strategy is to “load the car” with meetings and planning sessions when she comes south and get as much done in a day as she can. “I plan my work and work my plan,” said Fritz.

Working in the health-care field comes with challenges and many questions as this country reassesses patient care, according to Fritz. “I’m very supportive of what is going on because we are finally talking about health-care reform,” said Fritz.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think we are actually talking about health-care reform. It’s more about moving the deck chairs around on the boat to cut costs and not about redesigning care. The big question is how are we going to provide 100 percent access to health care? And then the question is �“ access to what?”

Fritz said traveling will always be a favorite thing for her. She is not planning to retire anytime soon and is constantly inspired by her own 94-year-old mother who still lives on the family dairy farm, still drives and takes water exercise classes a couple times a week, she said.

“Every six months or so I ask myself three questions: If I got up in the morning and I was delighted to go to work what would I be doing? With whom would I be doing it? Where would I be doing it?” explained Fritz. “As I answered the questions over the years I found what would change from time to time, almost cyclical, from teaching to direct care back to teaching. The whom has always been adults and health care. Where? Well, I guess it doesn’t matter to me where I am. I’m at home wherever I am.”