The board that governs Jacksonville, Fla.-based Nemours Foundation, which oversees the Nemours Children's Health System, welcomed four new members Monday.
The new members include James Hunt, retired executive vice president and CFO of The Walt Disney Co., Linda Norman, DSN, RN, dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing in Nashville, Marc Probst, vice president and CIO of Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, and Valerie Montgomery Rice, MD, president and dean of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.
"These four new directors bring a broad base of business, medical and healthcare IT management to the Nemours' board of directors as well as the passion for ensuring the provision of the highest quality of care for children and families," Brian Anderson, chairman of the board of The Nemours Foundation, said in a press release. "Their expertise and contributions to healthcare position each of them to make important contributions to Nemours' continued growth and transformation as an integrated children's health system at the forefront of providing care and services to restore and improve the health of children."
Rotating off the board are Jack Porter, John Lord, Geoff Rogers and Leonard Berry, PhD.
The board appointments are not without controversy, however. A report in The News Journal, a newspaper based in Delaware, calls attention to the loss of Delawarean representation after the appointments. None of the new members are from Delaware, and two of the four directors being rotated off the board are from Delaware, making the ratio of Delawarean directors lower. Now the board has two Delawareans left, according to the report.
The newspaper called attention to this as it is part of a decades-long legal battle over the wishes of the Nemours Foundation's founder, Alfred duPont, according to The News Journal. When Mr. duPont died in 1935 he asked that a board, made up of three-fifths Delaware residents, be created to oversee the foundation. The foundation today is governed by the Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust, which oversees the $5 billion trust, as well as an 11-member board of directors and two boards of managers — a 12-member one based in Florida and a five-member one based in Delaware, according to the report. The two boards of managers were created under a 2004 court judgment, according to the report.
Two of six trustees of the Testamentary Trust are from Delaware, according to the report.
Nemours spokesman Chris Manning told The News Journal the foundation chose directors based on their qualifications, not their state of residence.
Editor's Note: This report was updated 10/27 with names of individual board members and a headline to improve clarity.
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