Christine Hunter

Profile

REAR ADMIRAL Christine Hunter took the helm of Naval Medical Center San Diego in January, making local history by becoming the hospital’s first-ever female commanding officer. She takes over at a time when military hospitals around the country face intense scrutiny after serious problems with patient care were discovered at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Hunter’s leadership experience——especially during crises——will be an asset. A medical oncologist by training, two of her most formative career experiences involved natural disasters.

The first was an earthquake in Seattle in 2000, when she was commander of the Naval Hospital in nearby Bremerton. It was about 10 on a February morning, and the hospital started shaking. Hunter——who’d spent many years at Naval Medical Center San Diego——knew an earthquake when she felt one.

“I had this overwhelming sense of responsibility,” she recalls. “I was the commanding officer, and we had patients in surgery, in the ICU and people throughout the building.” Within 90 minutes, Hunter had declared an emergency, moved everyone but nonessential staff outside, stabilized patients and opened a tent hospital on the grounds.

The second experience was the December 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. At the time, Hunter was chief of staff at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, D.C. Within hours of the disaster, the Navy had decided to provide humanitarian assistance and sent its hospital ship, The Mercy, to the region. Hunter organized the mission.

“It was a crystallizing moment for me,” she says. “We had to think about the makeup of the staff, what we would need on a mission like this and how we could partner with NGOs and government agencies to get this done.” It was a completely new concept——partnering with nonmilitary organizations——that Hunter says changed her management perspective. “You find the word ‘collaborative’ a lot more now in my speaking and writing. I had a mentor who used to talk about a ‘team of teams,’ but my definition of that was not as broad as it became after the Mercy mission.”

Throughout her career, Hunter has championed the patient and worked to make military healthcare more accessible to active-duty and retired service members and their families. During her first assignment at the Balboa Park hospital in the 1990s, Hunter began offering family medicine for the routine care of children and adults. Before that, the medical center had focused mostly on a variety of specialties. She also opened primary-care clinics throughout the county.

Now back in San Diego, at the job Hunter says she has always wanted, she’s taking inventory and figuring out how to shape the Navy Medicine West command’s future. The medical center is known for preparing sailors, Marines and its own staff for deployment and for providing high-quality health services, says Hunter.

But with the war in Iraq still ongoing, one of her challenges is stabilizing the center’s staff by planning for vacancies that arise as members are deployed. The near future will also require personnel to expand into new areas of medicine, to provide the best quality care to returning troops, many with multiple, complex injuries. “Sometimes,” says Hunter, “a war provides opportunities to explore new types of medical treatments.”

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