Ever since he was a kid, Ryan Gibney, UCI Health’s associate medical director at its Orange, California, facility and an emergency medicine physician, knew he wanted to be a doctor.
But before that happened, he worked in the service industry for many years—and performed in a band—while he studied at med school. Once he took the plunge, he had a “meteoric rise” from residency to leadership, which includes serving as the incoming medical director of the health system’s new Irvine site, scheduled to open later this year.
Healthcare Brew spoke with Gibney about his career and what he’s hoping to accomplish in his new role.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How did you go from working in the hospitality industry to the hospital industry, and what did it teach you?
I moved out to California, where my mom had moved in the interim, and I ended up starting back in the service industry at a bar and restaurant in the area. It wasn’t until 2007 when I got married that I decided that looking longevity-wise and raising a family and that kind of career didn’t really kind of go hand in hand. And I did a very thorough self-inventory and said that I’m going to go back to college.
We actively look for people that have service experience. It teaches you a lot about people, a lot about anticipating needs, multitasking, and the behaviors that exist in emergency medicine. And I think if you want to be a reductionist about medicine in general, it is a service industry.
What was one of the most unexpected parts of transitioning into the medical field?
I found it to be so similar to working at a bar that it was almost off-putting.
I will say that this meteoric rise to admin and leadership is something I didn’t expect this fast. I’ve been in a full-fledged attending career—this is now my fifth year—and I’m already in charge of opening a new emergency room and hiring staff, and I’m involved in leadership strategy for the entire hospital. That’s a lot of very quick learning, but I think a lot of it comes from that route in the service industry and my life experience, being in my 40s and starting my career here instead of my 20s. I think that the ability to speak and interact with people and anticipate needs and see in a different way has lent itself to building this skill set quickly.
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Can you tell me about your new role at the UCI Health – Irvine hospital and how it might change compared to what you’re currently working on?
From a clinical lens, the work is going to be similar. I mean, emergency room is emergency room.
You know, in the service industry you do the soft opening, the friends and family, and all the policy procedures. That’s what we’re doing right now. It’s really all about the strategy of prepping as best as we possibly can, so on day one, when we open, we are really representing what we can do here at UCI.
Within the larger hospital world, what do you think needs to change the most?
The volume of patients that are sicker and sicker and that have challenges to access have led to this critical national problem of patients carrying out all their care in the emergency department—even their inpatient care—and it forces our work further and further out of the physical spaces that are designated as emergency medicine to where you’re doing stuff in the waiting room. Nationally, this is a problem. Locally, this is a problem. There’s a lot of downward pressure to do all these things that are just almost not possible in the primary care space.