LEBANON — Since opening its doors in 1932, Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital has been “Lebanon’s community hospital,” as outgoing CEO Sue Mooney described it.

It’s been Mooney’s goal to retain that essence during her term of leadership, which began in 2013 and she announced earlier this month will soon end with her retirement. She plans to stay on until a replacement is found, which is expected to take months. 

Retaining a sense of community was a particular priority when Mooney, now 62, facilitated APD joining the Dartmouth Health system, the biggest change she oversaw during her tenure.

“What the community really valued about us was that sense of when I go to APD, I am cared for as an individual, I'm seen and people listen,” Mooney, who announced her impending retirement earlier this month, said in an interview at the hospital Thursday. “That was sort of the heart of the organization and as we became part of a system, we recognized that we really needed to preserve that.”

The core of her work has been supporting APD’s staff so that they can provide the best care to patients and maintaining the hospital’s “culture” through big changes. 

In addition to guiding the affiliation process, Mooney, who first joined APD as an obstetrician and gynecologist in 2000, also led the hospital through the closure of its birthing center, as well as growth, renovations, the COVID-19 pandemic, technological advancements and the evolution of health care as a “very big business.”

The hospital joined the DH network in 2016 after two years of negotiations “in response to growing financial pressures at APD,” the Valley News reported at the time. Thursday, Mooney also said she saw the merger as a way to better serve the community.

“The academic center is full to capacity and beyond, and we had open beds,” Mooney said. “...We had to start to figure out how do we partner and work together and how do we do that without losing our soul.”

Since APD joined DH, Mooney said she has tried to “double down” on engaging with patients and staff to ensure the hospital preserves that “culture.”

Peter Mason, who is a semi-retired family physician, attributes much of APD’s success to Mooney, an “incredibly bright, confident administrator but also an excellent clinician.”

When Mason first arrived at APD in 1981, “it was in such difficult financial straits that middle management was asked not to cash their paychecks for two weeks because the cash flow was so bad. Fast forward to 2025 under Sue Mooney’s leadership and it has become the hospital of choice in the Upper Valley for so many people.”

Under Mooney’s guidance, the hospital has successfully maintained its “community hospital” identity, Laurie Harding, a retired nurse and former state legislator from Lebanon, said. 

Mooney “thought of everything in the context of what does the community need and what does the community want” from its hospital, Harding said.

Underpinning the culture Mooney has worked to create at APD is her commitment to the employees, said Marisa Devlin, chairwoman of the APD Board of Trustees. Under Mooney, the hospital’s workforce has grown from about 350 employees to 531.

Mooney has been well known to say “it’s impossible to support the patient if we’re not supporting the workforce,” Devlin said. She “knows everybody’s name” and “makes time for every person in that institution.”

That culture means patients get the sense that “these are people who are going to respect me, who are going to be honest with me, who are going to help me, but also frankly level with me during my time of need,” Devlin said.

State Sen. Sue Prentiss, D-West Lebanon, said she receives as much of her personal health care as possible through APD. 

“I love Dartmouth Health, but I like the small clinic, small hospital feel to what APD has meant to our community for all of these years,” Prentiss said.

Prentiss, a career paramedic focused on health care access, said she understands why APD joined Dartmouth Health and feels that the smaller hospital’s identity has been well preserved.

“It kept them in a sustainable position to serve,” Prentiss said. 

The “absolute hardest thing” that Mooney did in her tenure was close the hospital’s beloved six-bed birthing center in 2018, she said, but “it absolutely had to be done for so many reasons.”

“I think as a community, we lost something valuable,” Mooney said. “But I think what really led to losing that was all these changes that we're talking about; the pressures in health care, the changes in staffing and providers.”

Gifford Medical Center in Randolph now has the only hospital birthing unit in the Upper Valley outside of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.

“Do I think there are enough options? No, but I’m an old obstetrician,” Mooney said. “I think women should be able to get care everywhere, but I think DH does a really good job of being a safety net for this state.”

Having worked with Mooney when she was a provider and a leader at APD, Mason said she “raised the bar of excellence” and “understands health care from a clinician’s standpoint as well as from the administrative standpoint.”

While she eventually had to give up seeing patients, Mooney assisted in the operating room up until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has recently started again. 

“That keeps me connected to patients and health care and the people who work here in a way that if I didn’t ever get out of this office, I would not be,” Mooney said.

Though she didn’t provide details about her decision to retire, Mooney said that as a leader, “it's important to know when it's time to move on and to hand the organization off.”

The APD Board of Trustees and Dartmouth Health leadership will conduct a national search for Mooney’s replacement, which she anticipates will take “a couple of months” after they finish assembling a search committee. Mooney has agreed to stay on until her successor is found.

During this transition period, Mooney said her goal is to ensure that “the organization seamlessly keeps moving without me.”

Mooney said she thinks the best person for the job should be “as committed to the culture and the patients and the community as I am” and “be willing to change and adapt.”

“Everything's changing all the time, and you don't get to say, ‘No, we're not changing,’” Mooney said. “You’ve got to get on top of that wave.”

Clare Shanahan can be reached at cshanahan@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.