Bob Hernandez, DrPH, has watched campus, his department and UAB’s reputation blossom over the past 50 years. The Decatur, Alabama, native first came to UAB as a graduate student in 1969, in UAB’s first official year as an independent university. Now, 54 years later — 50 as a member of the staff and faculty — Hernandez has seen the program that he graduated from, and later led, become recognized as the best in the country. And retirement, he says, is still a few years away.
“Why have I stayed?” said Hernandez, a Distinguished Service Professor and director of the Executive Doctoral Program in Healthcare Leadership for the Department of Health Services Administration. For one thing, “the quality of the students we get is incredible,” he said. “And having colleagues that you really enjoy and are supportive of one another, and a work environment that is conducive to doing your best, makes it hard to leave.”
Next week, Hernandez will be honored for his five decades of service to UAB during the annual Service Awards Program Reception on March 21 in the Hill Student Center.
Two others — Stephen Barnes, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, and Suzanne Oparil, M.D., Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Disease — will be honored for 45 years of service, while five will be recognized for 40 years of service.
A list of others being honored for 20 or more years of service also is online.
“When I first joined the faculty here, we were almost exclusively male and Caucasian. Now we are majority female in the department and more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and religious backgrounds represented, [and] we are well above 50 percent female in our classes. That’s been a phenomenal change in terms of the opportunities for women and other under-represented groups.”
Opportunities abound
Hernandez graduated from one of the first classes of UAB’s Master of Science in Hospital Administration program (now the Master of Science in Health Administration) in 1971 and then spent several years as an administrator in the university’s new School of Optometry. He earned his doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1981 and joined UAB’s Department of Health Services Administration the same year as an assistant professor. By 1988, he was a full professor.
Employees with 20 or more years of service will be honored during the annual Service Awards Program reception at 2 p.m. March 21 in the Hill Student Center. See a list of all recipients here.
“When I first joined the faculty here, we were almost exclusively male and Caucasian,” Hernandez said. “Now we are majority female in the department and more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and religious backgrounds represented.”
The same goes for the student body in the department, he added: “There were 19 students in my class, and 18 of them were male; now we are well above 50 percent female in our classes. That’s been a phenomenal change in terms of the opportunities for women and other under-represented groups.”
Academia has a reputation for changing slowly, but the department “has been very responsive to the needs of the marketplace and community” as the health care landscape has shifted over time, Hernandez added. “When I got my master’s degree, the focus was to graduate, become an assistant administrator and run hospitals, period. Now our students may work in health insurance, consulting, medical group practice — there are all sorts of opportunities across the health care sector.”
The Master of Science in Health Administration is ranked No. 1 in the country by U.S. News. That “gives us cachet when working internationally,” Hernandez said. “When you are working in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and you can talk about having the number one ranking in the United States, that gets their attention and opens doors.”
Programs expand
In the 1990s, “we started an executive master’s program in health administration, and that was well received,” Hernandez said. “About a dozen years ago, we started the executive doctoral program for working professionals who could not come back to school full time and continue with their jobs. They can still come back for focused periods of study and improve their analytical and leadership skills.”
About the same time, Hernandez began working with the U.S. Agency for International Development to help Armenia, newly independent of the Soviet Union, transition its state-run health service to a free-market system. That work extended into Ukraine, where Hernandez developed a partnership with Bogomolets National Medical University in Kyiv to create a program for health administration. “It’s just devastating what has happened” in Ukraine with the ongoing war, Hernandez said. “The resilience of the people is just so moving — their willingness to face incredible odds to protect their way of life and their country.”
Over the years, the international work that Hernandez started expanded to include university partnerships in the Netherlands, Germany and Saudi Arabia, as well. His students were able to benefit from these opportunities to study how health care systems work in other parts of the world, broadening their outlooks on health policy, management and care delivery.
In 2009, Hernandez developed an international track of the executive master’s program. Four years later, the first class of Saudi Arabian hospital administrators graduated from the joint Executive Master of Science in Health Administration program partnership between UAB and the King Fahad Specialist Hospital-Damman.
In 2019, after steadily climbing the rankings for decades, UAB’s Master of Science in Health Administration was named the country’s top program by U.S. News & World Report. “We were very proud of that,” Hernandez said. “That ranking is an important one in our field. They will come out with new rankings this year, and we are expecting and certainly hoping to remain at number one.”
The ranking “probably allows us to do a better job of recruiting students in the MSHA and all of our programs, but the other thing it does is gives us cachet when working internationally,” Hernandez said. “When you are working in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and you can talk about having the number one ranking in the United States, that gets their attention and opens doors.”
“The world has changed, and UAB has been responsive to that in terms of developing to serve our communities in a more inclusive fashion.”
“The world has changed”
Even as UAB’s reputation has grown, keeping up with changes in health care means the department is constantly innovating, Hernandez says. As medical technology became ever more sophisticated, the department introduced a graduate program in health informatics, which is still the only one of its kind in Alabama. “Recently we developed one of the first accredited programs in health care quality and safety, and we also started a new program in health care simulation, recognizing that simulations are playing an ever more important and sophisticated role in health care, and that graduate training would help those who are writing simulation programs to do a better job of that,” Hernandez said.
But the department has also recognized that “not everyone wants to get a full-time degree, so we introduced certificate programs — short blocks of education in specific topics,” such as mixed methods research, “a cutting-edge way to look at what is happening in health care delivery,” Hernandez said.
“The world has changed, and UAB has been responsive to that in terms of developing to serve our communities in a more inclusive fashion.”
Change is also underway in the Department of Health Services Administration. On March 1, 2023, Jane Banaszak-Holl, Ph.D., became the department chair. She plans to build on its growth and success under Christy Harris Lemak, Ph.D., expanding the student body and research programs and “building on our core strengths in leadership and management, informatics, clinical simulation, and executive training,” Banaszak-Holl said.
“When you have to go to a hospital or you are ill, you are vulnerable. I think there is a special something about people who work in health care leadership — they are driven by a desire to see good care provided.”
Power in the “small things”
The after-effects of the COVID pandemic will continue to reshape health care in the United States and around the world, Hernandez said: “The pandemic has been devastating to the health care delivery system. There are still incredible problems with labor shortages, for example. It’s hard to say when we are going to reach a steady state again.”
But Hernandez has seen uncertain times before. And over his five decades of working with students aspiring to be health administrators, as well as those who have already reached positions of leadership, he has seen that the field tends to attract a certain type of person. “When you have to go to a hospital or you are ill, you are vulnerable,” he said. “I think there is a special something about people who work in health care leadership — they are driven by a desire to see good care provided.”
Having the opportunity to mentor these students is a privilege, Hernandez said: “Sometimes it is the small things. I have a student and I was on his dissertation committee. The topic he chose was based on one of the articles he read in my class. They read a lot of material in their time in the program, so to see that that one article inspired him makes it really worthwhile.”
