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Doctors names new chief nursing officer
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Doctors Hospital of Mantecas newly assigned chief nursing officer Kathy Daley. - photo by GLENN KAHL

Doctors Hospital has a new chief nursing officer with a passion for her vocation after scouring the country and seeking applications from coast to coast.

CEO Nicholas Tejeda tapped 26-year veteran of DHM, Kathy Daley, filling the position in-house rather than bringing someone in from outside.  

“With all our searching we found we had the best right here,” Tejeda said. 

Daley said that she gained respect and love for a nurse who showed her dedication in caring for her while she was hospitalized with both broken legs in traction and after seeing her 7-year-old brother died from injuries in a traffic accident in the family car with other members of her family seriously injured. Her father had died the previous year and her mother was a single mom at that time with 10 kids. 

Daley spent six weeks in the hospital. She was cared by a nurse named Agnes Wilson who was an older lady, who had never been married and  lived down the street from her family in Utah.     

“She brought me her little black and white TV to my room and made sure I had chocolate milk added to my milk to make me happy,” Daley said.  “She just did little things like that.”

The newly appointed chief nursing officer said she was first a certified nursing assistant (CNA) while still in high school, She then went on to become a licensed vocational nurse (LVN) and finally a Bachelor of Science Degree in nursing after having her own family and raising their children. She is now in the process of obtaining her masters’ degree. 

That nurse who took such good care of Daley years ago found a loving face of a student nurse who was doing her clinicals at her bedside when she was facing the last two days of her life —Daley was right there, the young girl she had befriended and had eased her fears and trauma with her loving attention. 

Daley first worked at Mountain View Hospital in Mason, Utah.  Her husband got a job in the Manteca area in 1988 and they moved to the Central Valley.

“I started working at Doctors Hospital of Manteca, which was then NME.  I first worked as a staff nurse in Med Surge and then to OB, labor and delivery, as a staff nurse and then became the director of education and performance improvement.  I took a corporate position for a short period of time and came back as the director of Med Surge and Inpatient nursing services,” she concluded.

She and her family have been married for 40 years and have five sons.  Their oldest is 39 and the youngest is 28.  Four out of the five are married, she added. None of them live in Manteca and two of them are going to France next year to go to school.  They Daleys have 11 grandchildren with one on the way.