I t has been an exciting year for Lois Skillings, who for the last six months has been at the helm of Mid Coast Health Services, providing a friendly, familiar face to the team she works with there.

Skillings took over as president and chief executive officer of Mid Coast Health Services on July 1, after the retirement of Herbert Paris from the position after 33 years with Mid Coast Hospital.

She also was recently appointed to the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority charged with redeveloping the former Navy base in Brunswick and Navy annex in Topsham. Though new to the board, it’s a job she said was too important to pass up, noting since news of the base closure was announced, “I think we recognized how critical having a really strong health care system would be to attracting new industry to our region.”

Skillings, who grew up in Pownal and attended Freeport High School, now lives in Brunswick with her husband, Jim. She attended nursing school at Northeastern University in Boston and has been a nurse for 33 years; 30 of those years served at Mid Coast. Most of her career she has worked in various leadership roles, however. She started as a staff nurse, then became a charge nurse, then a house supervisor, went on to staff development, and then was asked to be the chief nurse of the hospital — a position she held for 15 years. Then she was promoted as the executive vice president and worked for 18 months alongside Paris before his retirement.

“I’ve always approached my role as a health care leader from that value of taking care of patients,” Skillings said. As she moved up the professional ladder, however, she never thought of becoming a CEO or even the possibility until about three years ago, when several things happened simultaneously in her professional life.

First, Skillings was chosen to be a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Executive Nurse Fellow, a competitive national fellowship that accepts 20 nurses from around the country every year and puts them through an intensive three-year executive leadership training. It gave her courage, confidence and exposure to outstanding leaders from across the country who helped her realize the importance of working to improve the health of the community, Skillings said.

It was the panel that interviewed her during the program that asked her if she’d be a CEO, an idea the team at Mid Coast also encouraged and upon further contemplation, “I just realized that truly, my passion is the health of my community, and what better role to influence that than as the leader of the community’s premier health system?”

The vision Paris turned into his legacy “to get this organization to such a strong and stable place,” is remarkable, Skillings said. At the same time, “health care has never been under the spotlight as it is today. We are really just beginning a major transformation of the health care system in our country, our state and in our region. So it’s a very exciting time and an important time to be leading health care.”

Mid Coast Health Services is part of Paris’ vision, she said, to build an integrated health care delivery system that is a continuum of health care starting with primary care, specialty care and hospital care, but including CHANS home health care and the Mid Coast Senior Health Center for longer term care and skilled rehabilitation. It is a system that lets the whole team come to the table to develop protocols for breaking down silos so it can reduce waste and so the patient’s experience is smoother.

Looking to the future, Skillings said, “I think as we head into this new era of reforming the (health care) system,” health care providers should focus more on prevention and wellness, and be concerned not just with the sickness, but with the health of the community. In August, Mid Coast’s primary care and walk-in center at Brunswick Station opened, achieving a strategic goal to improve access to health care while reducing costs. The clinic exceeded expectations so that “We’ve had to add staff, and that’s a nice problem to have.”

Contact with the community and public outreach is her favorite part of the job. Partnerships with community groups like Access Health and Healthy Maine Partnerships, which have decades-long foundations working to instill healthier behaviors, are important, Skillings said as “we won’t improve the health of the population unless we get people more engaged around their own health care and for people to be excited about getting healthier and staying healthy, and people have to want to be part of that as well.”

The organization collected input from the community as it developed its 2020 Vision, which lays out goals she not only wants to see achieved a decade from now, but she plans to “be part of doing that here with this team, with this community, and I have no intention of going anywhere. I want to stay right here.”

She stresses, “We have such an amazing team here. We have outstanding doctors and nurses at the bedside giving care, and great leaders. Our senior management team, collectively, has worked here more than 120 years. It’s really the team that makes Mid Coast Health Services work.”

And because she has been a part of the community and organization for so long, “I love the fact that I am just Lois to everybody, I really am. I grew up with the people we’re serving; they’re my friend and family too that we’re serving, so I have a big vested interest in making this work.” Skillings is the oldest of two sisters and has an older brother. Her parents, both passed away now, owned a general store in Pownal that her mother ran. “I think my work ethic and focus on the customer in a way, if you will, really came from that background of being part of a family business,” Skillings said.

As proud as any mother of their grown child, she tells of her 23-year-old daughter, Emily, and her exciting life in New York, where she lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan. She loved being a mother, she said, but is enjoying this stage in her life. The hours her new job requires can be long ones but, “I am so lucky that I have my husband, who cooks me dinner every night, and he is so supportive,” and he keeps the home fires burning.

At 53, Skillings said when she’s not working she loves to be outside in nature, canoeing, reading, knitting or sailing, “and I’m pretty good at the helm I would say. I love sailing, love it.” But she admits, “My real passion is my work, to be honest. I take vacations,” as everyone does as part of the culture at Mid Coast, “but my passion is my work. I’m very lucky to have work that I love so much.”

She is also grateful “that I’m by nature an optimist and solution-focused, and I don’t know where I inherited that from but I’m glad,” Skillings said. “It’s not that I don’t have down days and I can get very discouraged just like we all can.”

She remembers a phone call she got from a man a few weeks ago who had just received a very tough diagnosis, who was calling to tell her “how grateful he was for how the staff in our CT scan department treated him, and what a difference they made in his day. So after I thanked him profusely and told him he made my day, I walked out and saw the staff and told them the story and said, ‘Look at the difference that we make in people’s lives that we don’t even realize.’”

“So whenever I’m having a bad day or I’m having a hard time,” she said, “I go out and make rounds. I just walk around and it always makes me feel better and I get back in touch with what really matters.”