Neurosurgeon aims to help remake Providence neuroscience program

A Marine Corps flag hangs in the office of Dr. Martin Holland, a gift from a former patient.

A camouflage backpack sits on top of a filing cabinet.

A picture of his daughter giving a salute cycles through his screen saver.

Holland’s past is reflected in his fourth-floor office at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett’s Colby Campus.

A decade ago, Holland was the head of neurotrauma at the University of California San Francisco — a surgeon with years of experience and training — when he quit at the age of 43 to enlist in the Navy.

He figured that head injury was the signature injury of the Iraq War. He had spent a decade working in neurotrauma. With his expertise, maybe he could help.

Plus, he loved the military.

“I love the formality of the service, I really do,” Holland said. “I love the, ‘Yes, sir, no sir,’ and the ‘Yes, ma’am and no, ma’am.’ To me, there’s something comforting in that. I like the idea of learning how to be a leader, what it takes to be a leader. There’s a difference between Captain Bly and Captain Cook in leadership styles.”

Now out of the military, Holland joined Providence in Everett this summer to serve as the chief of neurosurgery and the neuroscience program.

While his office reflects where he’s been, it also shows where Holland wants to go. Two whiteboards in his office lay out how he wants to transform Providence’s neuroscience program.

He is here to help make Providence the go-to place for patients with strokes, brain tumors and other head trauma in northwestern Washington.

Or, as Holland puts it, the idea is that “Seattle would take of their own and we would take care of our own up to the border of Canada.

“The freeway between here and Seattle is getting increasingly congested and a lot of patients don’t want to go down that route,” Holland said. “This is a pretty easy access.”

And that fits with the larger vision for Providence, which has moved from a large community hospital to a regional referral center for northwest Washington, said Joanne Roberts, the hospital’s chief medical officer.

One of the goals is to beef up neurosurgery and neuroscience, to a point where the hospital becomes a national leader in that care.

“We’ve had a lot of really strong neurosurgeons over the years,” Roberts said. “But I think this is the first time we’ve had our neurosurgeons perform as a team.”

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Holland, 53, comes from a family of soldiers.

His father attended West Point, as did his grandfather, who served as a colonel on Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff in the Pacific during World War II.

His grandmother worked as a cadet hostess at the military academy and set up many cadets with their future wives. (She’s buried at West Point. His grandfather and a couple of uncles are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.)

Holland was born in Mexico City, where his maternal grandfather was a physician in the Mexican army. Holland was raised with his family in San Diego.

He knew at age five that he wanted to go into medicine.

“I read all the King Arthur books,” Holland said. “I loved the idea of the code of chivalry — there was something about it that was very appealing to me. To me, there were two groups that had a code. One was the military and the other were physicians, with the Hippocratic Oath.”

After he graduated from high school, Holland attended Stanford University, where he joined the swim team as a walk-on.

He went on to medical school at the University of Michigan, with his twin sister, who went on to be a pediatrician.

He served his residency at UCLA, where he met his wife, Ping Chow, who was becoming an interventional cardiologist.

In 1997, Holland went to work at the University of California San Francisco, where he spent years in the operating room, eventually becoming director of neurotrauma, performing surgeries on patients who have suffered head and brain injuries in auto accidents, falls or even shootings.

“In my world, it’s not only an honorable profession, but it’s where you test yourself as an individual,” Holland said. “The second you put the blade on the skin, you have crossed a bridge that you can never uncross.”

Holland was working as part of a team to remake how neurotrauma was handled in the city of San Francisco when Sept. 11, 2001, happened.

At the time, Holland wanted to quit to join the service, but he felt he couldn’t leave the project he had just embarked on. By 2005, Holland felt the program was launched, so he left to enlist.

“I joined the Navy primarily because I wanted to deal with Marines,” Holland said. “I just like the Marine Corps, and there’s a lot about the Marine Corps that I feel fits with my mindset. The Marine Corps doesn’t have its own medical corps. The Navy is the Marines’ medical corps.”

Chow was supportive of her husband’s decision. She knew he had always wanted to join the military but hadn’t had the time or opportunity. What happened on Sept. 11 affected everyone deeply — or should have, she said.

“America is still the land of opportunity,” Chow said. “We have an obligation to serve that country. For Martin, the way he felt he could best serve the country was to join the Navy.”

Holland attended the Navy’s six-week Officer Indoctrination School in Newport, Rhode Island, with sailors half of his age. There he learned the Navy fight song and the Marine Corps hymn.

“It was kind of fun,” Holland said. “A lot of it was learning about the military courtesies and the traditions of the Navy.”

There was also the physical aspect of military training.

“I’m in pretty good shape,” Holland said. “Like I said, I swam in college and I continued to run. I had the second-best run of everybody, and I did more push-ups and sit-ups than all but one.”

As part of the training, he and the other recruits needed to dive off an imaginary ship into a deep pool and make flotation devices out of their pants.

“I felt very, very comfortable in the water,” Holland said. “Some people had never swum before. I thought it was crazy to join the Navy and not know how to swim.”

He had wanted to be stationed in Iraq, but by the time he enlisted the Navy had moved all of its brain trauma operations to the U.S. and Germany. Holland was stationed in San Diego and loved the work, treating sailors and Marines coming back from the war with head trauma.

He planned to spend the rest of his career in the military. But his wife still had a practice in the Bay Area, and living in separate cities was difficult for the family. When Holland was transferred to Germany for a prolonged tour, he realized it wasn’t a fit for his family.

So after four years of active service, Holland left the Navy and was hired as an associate director at Trinity Mother Frances Health System in Tyler, Texas. The job was great, but the family never adjusted to rural Texas. “Obviously, I wanted to make my wife happy,” Holland said. “So we headed back to San Francisco.”

In the Bay Area, Holland joined a former resident in private practice in Mountain View. He found the work uninteresting, doing very little involving patients with trauma, tumors or strokes.

Often, he would work with a patient who would get a dire diagnosis and the patient would leave for a nearby hospital with a more prestigious reputation.

“It was disheartening for me to see a patient with a brain tumor that I knew I could take care of, and then I would see them in clinic and I would tell them that I think you would benefit from surgery,” Holland said. “And then two weeks later, I would get a letter from Stanford or UCSF saying thanks for the referral, this patient was operated on and is doing fine. I had never made a referral.”

Instead, he was dealing with “back pain, neck pain, back pain, neck pain.” Holland trained many of the doctors who worked at UCSF, and that was frustrating.

Then Chow saw a job alert about the head of neurosurgery in Everett.

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Providence was looking for someone to lead a staff of four and a half neurosurgeons, someone who could take calls 24-7 for the emergency room and do consultations on the floor.

Holland, who interviewed in January, made a pitch that the position should be much more.

The way he saw it, the position should be in charge of everyone who deals with brain or nervous system disorders, not just the people doing the surgeries.

That included neuorologists — doctors who specialize in the nervous system who don’t perform surgeries — and rehabilitation specialists for people with strokes as well as potentially psychiatrists and psychologists.

“I’m interested in building the right program and not just doing a bunch of surgeries, but really creating a neuoscience program, because then you can build on that, you can expand to movement disorders, to epilepsy programs, to headaches, to Alzheimers, to things that are not surgical in nature but will take care of the population,” Holland said. “So they bought it and they hired me.”

Holland’s pitch fit with institutional goals for Providence Regional Medical Center Everett, Roberts said.

“He told us what we need to do, and that’s what we needed to hear,” Roberts said. “After I interviewed him, I said, ‘This is the kind of guy that we need. He’s going to be hard for me to live with, but he’s going to make my life as an administrator difficult for the right reasons.’”

Providence no longer considers itself just a community hospital. It seeks to serve the five counties of northwest Washington with a population of more than 1.25 million people.

In the past, the hospital has performed routine neurosurgeries, while more difficult cases were referred to Seattle hospitals, Roberts said.

Providence wants more of its departments to be modeled after its heart program, which enjoys a national reputation as a leader in innovation with strong outcomes, Roberts said.

Holland can help lead the hospital in that direction, Roberts said, along with some younger neurosurgeons who have joined the staff.

Holland thinks its going to take about six years to remake the neuorscience program at Providence.

It involves developing protocols across the board for all the physicians and nurses, from the emergency department to rehabilitation. They also need to build an infrastructure, including education programs and even the website.

And they need to recruit more staff, and the right staff, including more neurologists and rehabilitation specialists. To get the right people, it may include working with The Everett Clinic, which has strong neurologists, Holland said. It’s worth the effort.

“If you’re going to build something, you need to build something big,” Holland said. “You don’t just want to cut yourself short, you don’t want to just be doing spine surgeries, you really want to take care of the entire patient.”