When Maura Fields arrived at North Valley Hospital in 1983, it was a perfectly serviceable community hospital that met most of the needs of Whitefish. 

As she leaves the hospital behind in 2014, she leaves a patient-centric facility with multiple medical modalities, skilled surgeons and a 24-hour paramedic service.

Fields, 60, is the youngest of a top crew of registered nurses who have retired this year. The others, Martha Stadler, Kathy Rea and Steve Zwisler, are departing with more than 100 years of experience between them.

For Fields, who served as North Valley Hospital’s chief clinical officer for 16 years, there are no regrets from her experience.

“I felt that my work there was complete,” she said. “I’d been there for 31 years and had seen the hospital through many chapters. The hospital is in a very strong place today.”

As one of the major proponents of bringing the patient-centered Planetree philosophy to the campus and then of moving to a new facility just south of town, Fields helped steer North Valley Hospital through some of the biggest changes in its century-old history.

“At North Valley Hospital we’ve been focused on being a community hospital,” she said. “And we have kept pace with our community’s growth, enormous regulatory changes and financial challenges.”

Fields, a St. Louis, Mo., native, went to Saint Louis University and spent a brief nursing stint in Cottage Grove, Ore. and then in Libby at what was then St. John’s Lutheran Hospital.

She was hired by North Valley in 1983 as nursing director. Small towns with a sense of community are where she wanted to make her career.

“I had worked in very large systems and found my way to rural areas,” Fields said. “I really liked the connectivity and how you could help someone and later see them in the community — that immediate accountability.”

She took over the chief clinical officer position in 1998. Everything dealing with patient care, from check-in to check-out, fell under her purview. 

“I’ll miss the dynamics and challenges,” Fields said. “But I feel very complete in the point in which I exited.”

Fields said despite what she will miss, she is looking forward to retirement. Her husband, Edwin, is a builder and the two will spend time canoeing, skiing and fly-fishing. Her two adult children, Lynn-Wood, a filmmaker and teacher in Missoula, and Colin, a physician, graduated from Whitefish High School and “grew up” within the walls of North Valley Hospital.

“I’ve enjoyed having a structured, regimented career,” Fields said. “But I’m definitely enjoying the exact opposite of that right now.”

The tight community at North Valley Hospital (in 1983 it employed 150, today somewhere in the neighborhood of 450) is such that many nurses and doctors saw each other’s children grow up, and even had a hand in providing care.

That close sense of community comes from being a small hospital that has seen such rapid growth as Whitefish evolved. In 1983, North Valley Hospital did not have a cardiac intervention specialist, so many Whitefish patients were shipped down to Missoula or over to Spokane. 

With the parallel growth of Kalispell Regional Medical Center into a Type-III Trauma Center, only the most dire of cases need leave the Flathead. 

As one of 48 critical access hospitals — defined as a hospital with 25 or fewer beds and serving a rural population — North Valley Hospital provides care to a community which might otherwise be underserved. 

“The growth in our offered services has kept pace with the growth in our community,” Fields said. 

Her former role as chief clinical officer allowed her to nurture relationships between clinical disciplines. When the doctors and health-care providers come together, Fields said, the care for the patient improves. 

Her longevity at North Valley is linked heavily to that sense of community she found in small-town hospitals, but also the philosophy North Valley Hospital and its Planetree organizing system subscribes to.

“Demystifying, humanizing and personalizing,” Fields said. “These are the tenets which personify the philosophy of NVH.”

With these principles in place, even the loss of four long-term nurses doesn’t bother Fields. She believes she has left the hospital in more-than-capable hands.

“We worked as a team to really promote a culture that kept the patients at the center of our work,” she said. “The community supports our hospital and I believe will continue to do so in the future.”

Reporter Ryan Murray may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at rmurray@dailyinterlake.com.