Cooley Dickinson Hospital selects Kevin Whitney as its new leader

KEVIN WHITNEY

KEVIN WHITNEY

By ALEXANDER MACDOUGALL

Staff Writer

Published: 01-29-2025 4:24 PM

Modified: 01-29-2025 5:10 PM


NORTHAMPTON — After nearly six months of searching, Cooley Dickinson Hospital has found a new president.

Kevin Whitney, a doctor of nursing practice and registered nurse with more than 34 years of experience working in health care, will assume the position of president and chief operating officer on March 15.

The Southampton resident has been serving as the chief nursing officer for Cooley Dickinson, as well as interim vice president for patient care services. He also worked as vice president for community operations for the community division of Mass General Brigham, Cooley Dickinson’s parent hospital system.

One area Whitney said he will prioritize as president is recruitment efforts with the hospital’s talent acquisition team to ensure the hospital is fully staffed. Cooley Dickinson, like other hospitals across the state, suffers from a shortage of primary care physicians, making it difficult for new patients to enroll and putting a strain on existing primary care physicians affiliated with the hospital.

More than 2,100 people are employed by the hospital, making it one of the largest job  providers in the region. 

“It’s really critical to make sure we’re recruiting for those positions, especially in primary care, also for our specialty care, and we’ll be doing that,” Whitney said in an interview. “Making sure we develop a pipeline and continue to look at ways to increase our ability to recruit, but also ensuring the best environment to practice and to learn is really to help us with retaining excellent, qualified team members.”

Whitney is the hospital’s first full-time president since the departure of Dr. Lynnette Watkins, who left in August after a three-year stint as the hospital’s president.

Though having spent most of his career in the Boston area, Whitney got his start in health care doing paramedic clinicals for Holyoke Hospital when he was student at Northeastern University. Whitney said that his upbringing in the central Massachusetts town of Ashburnham inspired him to enter the health care field.

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“Both my mother and father were firefighter EMTs in the town, as well as my brother,” Whitney said. “I owe a lot to that upbringing for really fostering a desire to enter a career in health care.”

Originally trained as a paramedic, Whitney got his official start at Emerson Hospital in Concord, where he met his wife, Cynthia, who was working as a nurse in the emergency department. It was Cynthia who first suggested to Whitney that he go back to school to become a nurse. Whitney then joined his wife in the emergency department while continuing to serve as a paramedic, before transitioning to leadership roles, becoming assistant manager and then director of the department in a period spanning 20 years at Emerson.

Whitney then moved to the Mass General Brigham hospital system, serving as the associate chief nurse for surgery, orthopedics and neurosciences at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2011 to 2017. He then worked as chief nursing officer and senior vice president of Patient Care Services at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, another MGB member, from 2017 to 2022.

Whitney earned his doctor of nursing practice and executive leadership degree from the MGH Institute of Health Professions; a master’s degree in health care administration from Framingham State University; a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Massachusetts Lowell; and an associate degree in paramedic technology from Northeastern University.

Since August, Debra Rogers, a former senior vice president for ophthalmology at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston, had been serving as the interim president for Cooley Dickinsohospital since Watkins’s departure. Rogers had moved from Boston to the Pioneer Valley prior to taking the role.

“Cooley Dickinson is my hometown hospital. Several of my grandchildren were born here, and it is where my family and I receive our health care,” Rogers said in a statement. “It has been my honor to serve as interim president and to learn from and collaborate with so many talented leaders at Cooley Dickinson Hospital.”

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.