McDonough District Hospital in Macomb has a new president and CEO who’s already quite familiar with MDH and the community.
The hospital’s Board of Directors voted unanimously to hire Bill Murdock. He had been the hospital’s interim president and CEO for nearly five months, and before that he served as its chief financial officer for five years.
Board Chair Jere Greuel said the search committee conducted a survey, and received a lot of positive feedback about Murdock.
“We did a real good search, and came up with several candidates which probably would have been good, but Bill just stood out of all of them,” Greuel said.
Murdock’s appointment took effect immediately. He has a five-year contract with a starting salary of $425,000.
Murdock found it helpful to serve as interim president and CEO.
“It gave me the confidence that I could do this job over the period. Every day I felt a little more comfortable, a little more confident in my abilities to take the organization to the next level,” he said.
Murdock replaces Brian Dietz, who was suspended with pay late last year after employees complained that he created a toxic work environment.
Dietz later reached a separation agreement with the hospital.
Murdock intends to focus on improving the workplace culture and being more open with the larger community.
“We’re trying to build trust, communication, collaboration with everybody at all levels. We want everybody to feel like we’re approachable and they can ask us any questions and we’re going to give them the answers,” he said.
“This is a community hospital, and we want them to feel like they’re part-owners of this organization.”
Murdock is also looking for ways to collaborate with the region’s other hospitals, even though they could be considered potential competitors as well as partners.
“We’re trying to figure out what we can do on a joint-venture level because we don’t want a lot of redundancy. We’re a lot stronger if we work together than against each other,” he said.
Murdock was familiar with Macomb even before he came on-board as CFO five years ago.
He graduated from Western Illinois University. His wife graduated from Macomb High School and WIU, and two of their children graduated from Western as well.
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