By Matt Skoufalos
Growing up in Adairville, Kentucky, a small town of about 1,200 people on the Tennessee state line, Tony Thurmond knew that if he wanted to see the world, he’d have to first escape the rural community in which he was reared. After high school, where he’d been a leading varsity basketball player, Thurmond walked on to the team at David Lipscomb University in Nashville, and promptly saw his dreams of a collegiate athletics career evaporate.
“It was an eye-opening experience, because I went to play basketball,” Thurmond said. “I wanted to explore and see more, so I joined the Air Force.”
After testing, Thurmond was selected to enter the U.S.A.F. surgical technician program. Having grown up on a farm, Thurmond believed his work experience to have been the furthest thing from a technologically driven assignment like surgery, but he dove in, and found that he really enjoyed the work.
Ten years later, Thurmond had made rank rapidly, and seen and experienced much more of the world than had been available to him in Kentucky. By the time he was offered a nursing technician supervisory role in South Korea, however, Thurmond decided he’d rather try his hand at a private-sector career.
“I got married, and at that point, family started being more of a priority,” he said. “It was a tough decision, but we’d had our first child, and I didn’t want to miss out on anything like that.”
At that point, Thurmond was living just outside of Dayton, Ohio, near to his wife’s family, which helped support his decision to transition to civilian life. Leveraging his experience in operating room settings, he embarked on a career in orthopedic sales, but quickly tired of the long hours spent on the road between destinations. Thurmond signed on with Dayton Children’s Hospital as a surgical technician, and dove into the work.
“It was great,” he said. “I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
“Children are the bravest of the patients,” Thurmond said. “They acclimate to situation betters. They want to learn; they want to know what’s going on. So, if you talk with them and explain what’s going on, I think they have better outcomes.”
For the whole of his medical career, Thurmond had only worked in a military environment, performing adult procedures; helping to care for children was a new experience altogether. But towards the end of his military service, he was pressed into duty during the birth of his first son.
After hours of labor, the decision had been made to perform an emergency Cesarean section on Thurmond’s wife; however, in the early hours of the morning, the OR team wasn’t yet assembled to do it. The physician told Thurmond, “We have to go now,” and he sprang right up.
“I remember pulling in the emergency cart,” he said. “I started scrubbing my wife for her C-section. It was a very emotional time.”
The regular OR unit arrived shortly into the procedure, but Thurmond’s confident, professional response had gotten him through a difficult circumstance. The impact of that moment resonated throughout his career, most immediately in a subsequent role Thurmond accepted at an adult trauma facility after a few years at Dayton Children’s.
“I got to see my share of stab wounds and gunshots and all that; more than I wanted to,” he said. “But I also worked evening shift, and would always go down to sterile processing to help out when I could.”
The more time he spent in the sterile processing unit, the more Thurmond felt like it could be a good fit for him.
“The desire to work there has always been there,” he said. “Sterile processing is one of those departments that’s hidden; nobody knows about it, but surgery couldn’t do their job without us.”
Sterile processing work also resonated with Thurmond’s humble outlook on his profession, and the hard work it takes to perform an excellent, if unseen, and critical role within the surgical team. Soon enough, a supervisory position opened up at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which led to a management position at another facility in Richmond, Indiana, and, eventually, an opportunity to be involved with building a sterile processing department from the ground up at OhioHealth Dublin Methodist Hospital in Dublin, Ohio.
“It was a really good opportunity to show how you can really build a culture,” Thurmond said. “Then with any new facility, you go through the trials and experimenting with things to see if they’ll work. It was a lot of long hours and it was rewarding.
“I was impressed that they gave us the reins to do that,” he said. “They didn’t have a team that came in and said, ‘This is how your culture is going to be.’ They allowed us to build it. I learned that it’s OK to make mistakes and it’s OK to work through them as long as you take ownership of them.”
A sports fan broadly, and a basketball fan in specific, Thurmond said he’d always believed he could build a work team with the same skill set that made him a successful youth basketball coach. Taking his inspiration from titanic UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who coached future NBA greats like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton in college, Wooden’s leadership principles originated in the prior century, but still ring true today, Thurmond said. In a professional environment that has little tolerance for error, Wooden’s famous maxims – turns of phrase like, “Make friendship a fine art,” “Make each day your masterpiece,” and “There is no substitute for hard work and careful planning” — still resonate in Thurmond’s department today.
“I think our staff understands that there’s a firmness to what we do, and there’s no deviation,” he said. “In the past, it was [an attitude of] ‘leave well enough alone,’ whereas today, we’ve implemented more quality measures. I’m just glad to see that sterile processing is starting to gain the recognition and the respect that it hasn’t always had.”
Throughout his three-year tenure on the board of the Healthcare Sterile Processing Association (HSPA), Thurmond had the dubious distinction of having to cancel its 50th anniversary conference during the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic; however, that was tempered with travel to Europe, Mexico City, the Netherlands, and beyond, connecting with colleagues across the globe.
“There’s a lot of things happening,” he said. “HSPA is working with a lot of great organizations, so it’s really great to see how we’ve come to our seat at the table.”
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