2011 Up and Comers: AnneMarie Czyz

Childhood illness may have kept AnneMarie Czyz from her dream of joining other kids on the ski slopes, but it also gave her unusual insight into the power of caring and skilled nursing.

After repeated childhood surgeries to remove some benign cysts, it was always nurses who gave her strength and confidence that things would get better for her. By the time Czyz was in ninth grade, she knew she wanted to join them.

Now an advanced-practice nurse and described by colleagues as “a great athlete,” Czyz says her first love—bedside nursing—remains the core of her approach to any position in which she serves.

“Everything I bring to the organization or to the team really comes down to the people,” Czyz says. “Patients matter the most to me.”

In her career at St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, N.Y., Czyz moved from a staff nurse in a cardiac-care unit, to a nurse educator and then a nurse manager role. In recent years her positions have advanced into executive leadership at the organization. In 2008, she was named vice president of clinical and educational services and chief nursing officer at the 431-bed hospital and healthcare network.

Moving the now 34-year-old Czyz into the CNO position was highly unusual, as the range of experience required generally takes decades to acquire. But Czyz's passion and skills also are highly unusual, colleagues say.

“We refer to her as ‘our nurse prodigy,' ” says Kathryn Ruscitto, president and CEO of St. Joseph's, about Czyz's nursing and management abilities.

Those skills include the ability to integrate her technological savvy in health IT and her expertise with the growing number of federal requirements placed on hospitals to drive improvements in the hospital's nursing corps. Those efforts are credited with St. Joseph's continued designation as a Magnet Hospital for Excellence in Nursing by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. It first achieved that status in 2002.

Such accomplishments and lofty praise appear less important to Czyz than the personal touch that first brought her into healthcare.

For example, she follows the management style known as servant leadership, which emphasizes service to others as the primary goal of executives at any level. That approach tracks the Franciscan philosophy of her hospital, which is sponsored by the Sisters of St. Francis.

She puts that thinking into practice, in part, by focusing on carefully listening to others without jumping to assumptions, especially when there is a problem.

“Every time I take the time to do that I can see flags that come up, and it really does provide the insight to make better decisions,” she says. “Situations are never what they first present themselves as.”