From Where We Sit: Timely Thoughts from Kathy and Liz. October 25, 2022

The theme for this year's ICAHN Annual Conference on November 10 in Champaign is The Rural Health Story: Community and You. In the spirit of that theme, we are welcoming guest bloggers over the next few weeks to tell their health story. Today we welcome Nat Hall, SPHR, Chief Human Resources Officer at Memorial Hospital in Carthage, IL, who shares an intriguing story. 

Northern Tales of Injustice, Misdirection and Cover Up: The Sonya Ivanoff Story

When we go about our daily work lives in our hospital, clinic or wherever we work in healthcare, there is always a heightened sense of awareness into the concern, hurt and pain we experience with the patients and clients we serve.  When that scenario is suddenly flipped to one of our co-workers being in this situation, how now do we respond to that?  Is there a way to be remotely prepared for this situation?  There is no way to truly know until you are actually thrust headlong into the melee.

In August of 2003, two years into my first HR Director position at a soon to be newly minted Critical Access Hospital in rural northern Alaska, the most heinous crime was committed against one of our most promising and well-liked new employees. This young lady was murdered, and with it occurring in a land-locked town in a frontier setting on the wind-swept tundra in northern Alaska, the murderer, later found to be a local Police Officer, had created the most incredible situation of misdirection and false accusation possible.

The Alaska State Troopers and local Nome Police showed up unannounced to our HR offices demanding to review personnel records as well as all other relevant employment information about one of our young up-and-coming employees at the corporation. They flashed their badges and credentials at us and requested we not ask questions. Not until days later did we get the information that the young lady, who was our employee, was murdered and that this was becoming quite the high profile investigation. 

This type of investigation, which now included the Alaska State Bureau of Investigation, was fraught with a lot of rumor in our rural town and region of northwestern Alaska and had all kinds of twists and turns which really made it as puzzling, perplexing and most certainly frustrating as it could be.  With the ensuing investigation, at first pointing toward a young man that seemingly had all the evidence pointing right at him (with plenty of talk occurring around town as the young man had a reputation for being emotional and prickly), swiftly taking a U-turn into the unknown and ultimately down the road of a Police Officer betraying his oath to the public to protect and to serve, it would have been very easy for our healthcare organization to destabilize and devolve into chaos as the Police Officer was the nephew of two of our most prominent and long-tenured Directors. Not only was the officer a family member of these two Hospital Directors, he was living with two other of our long-tenured hospital employees and this officer was a member of a local religious organization that had many local members, multiple of which were employed by the Hospital.

With underlying tensions starting to mount within the hospital, community and region, and many people starting to take sides for or against the Police Officer, multiple meetings were held at the hospital to ensure that we were both operating and behaving properly in the middle of this regional emotional storm.  Taking somewhat of an Incident Command posture to our meetings, we truly tried to ensure we were handling this devastating event in the most methodic yet sensitive manner possible. This type of approach, which we started during the incident and then continued on for months afterward, really helped us cope with the incident as an organization.       

There have been multiple stories over the years regarding Sonya’s murder, but there has been renewed interest in this murder as a very recent 2 hour NBC Dateline feature aired from one week ago (October 14, 2022) regarding the murder of Sonya Ivanoff.  This Dateline special, titled “A Walk in the Rain” has unearthed even more information about this case to the public than was previously shared before.

Watch Dateline Episode: A Walk in the Rain - NBC.com

Thank you Nat! The story of rural is the story of you! Join us at the ICAHN Annual Conference, November 10, 2022, in Champaign, IL. LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE.

If you would like to share your rural health story in this blog, contact Kathy or Liz.