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Dr. Russ Kino: Jews Feel at Home at Sisters of Charity hospital

“The thing that people probably don’t know about St. John’s,” said Allan Goldman, the lawyer who is chairman of the St. John’s Health Center Foundation, “is that today, maybe even more than 50 percent of its medical staff is Jewish, and over 30 percent of its patients are Jewish. The last three chairs of the foundation — Jerry Epstein, Abbott Brown and myself — all Jewish.”
[additional-authors]
July 21, 2010

“The thing that people probably don’t know about St. John’s,” said Allan Goldman, the lawyer who is chairman of the St. John’s Health Center Foundation, “is that today, maybe even more than 50 percent of its medical staff is Jewish, and over 30 percent of its patients are Jewish. The last three chairs of the foundation — Jerry Epstein, Abbott Brown and myself — all Jewish.”

This isn’t what you’d anticipate at a hospital founded by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, a Kansas-based order of Roman Catholic nuns that traces its religious roots back to 17th century France. It certainly isn’t what you’d anticipate looking at the Santa Monica hospital’s new south-facing façade, which is dominated by a towering, tasteful seven-story cross.

Goldman, 73, who has served on the foundation’s board since 1978, has also held board positions at Leo Baeck Temple, the Union of Reform Judaism and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

In January 1994, when Goldman was chairman of the health center’s board of trustees, the Northridge earthquake irreparably damaged the north building and shuttered the entire complex for nine months. The future of St. John’s was far from certain.

“It took a lot of courage on the part of the sponsoring organization, the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, to say, ‘Yes, let’s go forward and rebuild the health center,’ ” Goldman said. He and other St. John’s lay leaders committed to raising at least $125 million locally for the project. “To date, we have raised almost $250 million,” Goldman said, “plus $140 million from FEMA.”

Altogether, the cost of construction for the Chan Soon-Shiong Center for Life Sciences (which opened in 2005) and the adjacent Howard Keck Diagnostic and Treatment Center (which opened in 2009) totaled $500 million.

Of the Jewish leaders who helped St. John’s rebuild and recover, former Foundation chair Epstein is one of the most devoted. “If you had to hold up a model trustee, you’d include a picture of Jerry,” said Robert O. Klein, vice president of the St. John’s Foundation.

Epstein was a great asset when it came to the rebuilding project — and not just as a generous donor. “He has built so many things in his life,” Klein said of Epstein, a prominent Marina del Rey developer, “and has been through, as he calls it, ‘the drill.’ When things did arise, he’d been down this path before, so he was great counsel to hospital leadership.”

Epstein, 86, was being treated at St. John’s at the time this article went to press and could not be reached for an interview. But just a week earlier, Klein had him act as the official starter for the Pacific Palisades Will Rogers 5K and 10K July 4th Run. “Even though his age is advancing, his interest and energy has not slowed down in the slightest,” Klein said.

Dr. Russ Kino, 51, is one of the many Jewish physicians caring for patients at St. John’s. As medical director of the emergency department, the Australian-born doctor heads the group of 40 doctors, nurses, administrative staff and others who run the ER in the hospital’s new north building.

The building, only six months old, is a far cry from the setting in which Kino first practiced, as a member of Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service. With three planes, several pilots and five nurses, Kino covered 500,000 square miles of the Australian Outback, providing top-flight care to the most isolated areas of the country. “We would land on roads and in fields and rescue people,” Kino said, trying and failing to downplay the coolness factor of being a doctor with an airplane. “Twenty-four hours on, 24 hours off,” he said, describing the alternating shifts he and one other doctor on staff would work. “When you were on duty, you were flying, and when you were off-duty, you were looking after the patients back at home base in the hospital. It was really fun, really exciting.”

Kino is now in his 16th year at St. John’s, his days of treating patients in the back of a twin-propeller plane long over. The brand-new ER is outfitted with all the latest technology — he recently tested a fiber-optic video scope that will help the staff intubate patients more effectively. Flat-screen TVs hang in every patient’s room, and computer monitors for reading X-rays hang opposite the large LCD screen that has replaced the dry-erase board to help doctors keep track of patients in their care.

But more than its advanced medical technology, its completely new facility and its doctors, what patients benefit from most at St. John’s, Kino said, are its extraordinary nurses. “The doctoring makes a difference if the right decisions are made, the right surgery, the quality of the thought process that goes behind your care. But what you notice from minute to minute is predominantly based upon the nurses, because they’re the ones that the patients interface with most of the time.”

“Jewish patients,” Kino added, “would feel very comfortable here.”

St. John’s appeals to one other notable group of patients: doctors.

“We have a lot of physicians who don’t work here,” Kino said, “but their families come here. Doctors who know what to do and know the inner workings often send their families here.”

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