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Posted on Thursday, 11.19.09

Jackson Health Systems chief charts hospital's rebound

Chief Executive Eneida Roldan wields her knife at losses at Jackson Health Systems.

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Eneida Roldan

BY JOHN DORSCHNER

jdorschner@MiamiHerald.com

At 8, she dissected a dead lizard with her grandmother's kitchen knife. At 24, she was a doctor-in-training when her husband proposed to her in a Jackson Memorial snack shop.

Eneida Roldan became a pathologist, operator of nutrition clinics, got two advanced degrees, helped a small hospital out of bankruptcy. Now she's taken on the daunting task of leading Miami-Dade's public health system as it struggles with massive losses.

She says she was offered other jobs -- with much more prosperous hospitals -- before she joined the Jackson Health System. She doesn't regret turning them down. ``I would have been bored.''

Now, in her sixth month of leadership, Roldan, 52, is getting cautious praise. `It can't possibly be anything but an extraordinary challenge to run that institution at this time,'' says Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association. ``I think she's doing as good a job as anyone could under those circumstances.''

Born in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana, she came to Miami when she was 2, starting in an apartment house near the Orange Bowl, then to The Roads area of Miami, attending St. Peter and Paul Church where many of the Pedro Pan kids went.

``I was always very curious.'' That's why she opened a lizard. She won prizes at the Dade Science Fair and was a volunteer Candy Striper at Mercy Hospital, becoming a part-time electrocardiography technician while majoring in chemistry at the University of Miami.

As she graduated, she wanted to go to med school, but finances were limited. ``I graduated with honors, but my father had a devastating event . . . in business. He was in the airlines, and in restaurants. It was not a good time for my family.''

FAMILY SUPPORT

Her grandmother and mother strongly supported her career choice. Her father was concerned that a doctor might not get married and have a family.

For financial reasons, she says, she applied only to an offshore medical school, Ross University, in Dominica, with clinical studies in the United States.

When she applied for residency programs, Jackson Memorial was her first choice. She went into pathology -- ``because I loved the investigative science.''

She first met her husband, Carlos Valdes-Lora, at the Dade County morgue when he was a first-year resident at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute. ``He called and wanted the results of an autopsy I was performing. . . . I said absolutely not. `I won't release until I complete my assessment on cause of death.' He was so persistent he came to the morgue because he wanted to know who told him no.''

That autopsy -- of a baby -- led to her writing a research paper. ``We know now the baby had AIDS, but back then,'' in 1981, ``we didn't know.''

They kept meeting. One day, after she had just pulled an all-night work shift, ``he proposed on a napkin. He wrote three dates. I said, `What's this for?' . . . And he said, `We'll pick one to get married.' ''

She spent the next 20 years juggling a restless mix of business, science and education while raising three children. She started as a pathologist, then spent a dozen years running weight-management clinics that had a staff of 30. All that didn't stop her from commuting to Tampa to get a master's in public health at the University of South Florida and then to Knoxville to get a master's in business administration. ``I'd be on a plane at 7 in the morning for two years. I had great support from my family.''

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