PICAYUNE — Highland Community Hospital recently added two fresh faces to its administrative personnel — Doug Jones as the Interim Administrator and Mark Stockstill as the hospital’s new Chief Operating Officer.

Jones grew up in various places due to his father’s work with the Civil Service. In 1992, Jones earned his MBA from University of Alabama at Birmingham. The following year he earned his Masters in Health Administration from the same university.

Jones said out of graduate school he found employment with Baptist Health Systems in Birmingham. When he left, he was the Chief Operating Officer for two of their hospitals at the same time. He then worked for Mobile Infirmary Medical Center and Resurgence Health Group, at separate times. At both facilities he served as CEO.

He was the Executive Director of Adams Management Services Corporation for five years prior to coming to Highland. Jones was hired by Forrest General Hospital in June of 2009 to serve as the Interim Administrator for Highland Community Hospital in Picayune.

Stockstill is a Picayune native who worked with the Pearl River County Sheriff’s Department as a dispatcher for four years in the early 1980s. He changed professions to work in EMS, and then decided to attend nursing school at Pearl River Community College, graduating with honors.

He went on to work in a New Orleans emergency room after graduation, flight care and an intensive care unit.

Before moving into nursing, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve. He was given commission as an officer in the Army Reserve after graduation and sent to flight school for aerospace medicine.

The previous five years of his medical career were spent at Slidell Memorial Hospital as its Chief Nursing Officer.

After Hurricane Katrina, he not only worked as the Chief Nursing Officer but was also given the duty of working to establish the hospital’s Cancer Center.

“You never relinquish responsibility in this business,” Stockstill said.

Recently he felt the urge to return to his hometown and better the community. That urge prompted him to apply for the position of Chief Operating Officer at Highland, which he filled in October of 2009.

While in his new position, he plans to better the services provided at the hospital by working to have employees that enjoy what they do.

“If you have a nurse that feels good about their profession, they’re going to put that much more into it,” Stockstill said.

To that end, Stockstill will employ the difference between management and leadership. In management people are instructed to do things they might not want to, but in leadership the goal is to lead people to want to do what is needed.

Annually there are about 100,000 deaths nationwide due to medical mistakes, Stockstill said. He said he will work with Highland’s staff to avoid such incidents.

Last year the hospital worked to lower the rate of people who leave the emergency room without getting the medical attention they need due to long waits. The average rate of people leaving without being seen has been 6 percent at Highland, Stockstill said. In 2009, the staff was able to bring that figure down to 3 percent. Stockstill said the national average is 2 percent.

The hospital was able to achieve that reduction by gathering all the hospital’s staff and looking at each piece of the puzzle to get rid of procedural clutter and put processes in place to reduce emergency room wait time. The average wait for care in the emergency room used to be of an hour, but now has been reduced to an average of 40 minutes, Stockstill said.

Stockstill and Jones both said their aim is to fix any procedural deficiencies at the current location before the new hospital is built.

“We don’t want to take broken processes to a new hospital,” Jones said.

Stockstill said he also wants to improve the community’s opinion of the hospital and work towards the hospital being a community partner by forming relationships with the community.

Jones said the new hospital is on track for construction. Design and development of plans for the hospital should be completed by April. Forrest General’s board is expected to travel to Wall Street in March to get ratings for a bond issue.

Construction of one of two medical buildings will begin before construction of the hospital. When complete, the hospital will have 60 beds, 49 for regular hospital care and 11 for observation, Jones said. If needed in the future the hospital can expand to 120 beds.

Jones estimates that construction of the hospital will begin in October of this year, with completion expected by April 2012. He expects, if all time frames work out, to move all hospital services to the new location by at least June 2012 and begin operations in the new facility by July of that year. Jones said the current facility belongs to Southern Regional Corporation and that company will decide what becomes of it after Highland moves out.

Other future plans include recruiting up to 20 primary care physicians to the Picayune area. Jones said the hospital is working to recruit five new physicians to the area, but that will take some time.