Amy Mansue says she has one job lined up for retirement.
She’s a volunteer in the neonatal intensive care unit, and she plans to keep it. Her role: cuddling babies.
“I’m not going to give that up, but I won’t be giving advice while I’m there,” she said. “I’m just going to cuddle.”
Mansue, who announced Tuesday that she’ll retire as CEO of Inspira Health at the end of the year, isn’t taking an emeritus title. She isn’t joining the board. She isn’t sticking around to look over the shoulder of her successor, longtime colleague Warren Moore.
“No, I’m retiring,” she said. “He does not need me hanging around. If he wants to reach me, just like he has over the last 23 years, he will find me. But I do not need to be haunting anything.”
It’s a clean exit, she said. And it’s one that fits.
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Mansue has had about as full a career as anyone in New Jersey health care. She worked for Jim Florio and Jim McGreevey, served as a deputy commissioner of Human Services, ran Children’s Specialized Hospital for 13 years and helped lead the state’s COVID response. She chaired the New Jersey Hospital Association and served as the first female chair at the State Chamber of Commerce.
But talk to the people around her, and they don’t start with the résumé.
“She jokes about it and says it’s the social worker Amy, but that’s the reality,” Moore said. “Amy, at the core, just cares about people.”
Mansue would put it another way: It’s about economics. She doesn’t say it coldly, but in a reality-based way that has driven her.
“People’s health is determined by so many different things, but mostly it’s determined by their economic situation and the quality of their life,” she said. “I wish I could say it comes out of some great motivation to be a better person, but it’s about economics.”
And she has a line that says it all.
“I don’t have the audacity to talk to somebody about how to manage their diabetes if they don’t have a refrigerator to store that insulin in,” she said.
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That view is how she ended up in South Jersey.
Mansue was at RWJBarnabas Health when John DiAngelo, then Inspira’s CEO, called and told her to throw her hat in the ring. She laughed it off. The two had never agreed on much.
“I would see the sky as blue, and John would say it was green,” she said. “Anybody who hired you was not going to hire me.”
Then Inspira’s board chair at the time, Mike McLaughlin, asked for an hour. He told her about communities where the plants had closed, where people couldn’t get to work or a doctor, and where the hospital was the anchor.
She could have stayed where she knew everybody. Instead, in the middle of a pandemic and before there was a vaccine, she took the job.
“I could go down here and end my career at a place where I might be able to make some small bit of difference in the time that I’m here,” she said.
She didn’t arrive with a grand plan.
“There are no silver bullets,” she said. “If there were silver bullets, we would have done them already. This is just hard work day in and day out.”
What she did bring was a voice. Lots of good work was already happening at Inspira, she said, and it needed someone to tell people about it.
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Mansue knows what she brings to a room, and what she takes out of it.
“The truth of the matter is, I can suck the air out of the room,” she said with a laugh.
That’s part of why she’s leaving now. Inspira has spent six years building its name and its visibility. What it needs next, she said, is the kind of deep partnerships Moore is better suited to build.
“I think that’s one of the most important gifts of leadership: being able to understand when the things that got you here are not the things that you need next,” she said. “Seeing that so clearly gives me comfort to be able to step aside with joy.”
Not that she’s losing her voice.
On the day her retirement became public, Mansue spent her time on the phone, calling nonprofit leaders and community members to thank them for their help over her tenure.
Come January, she’ll eagerly talk to those who can benefit the most from all she has helped accomplish at Inspira: The babies in the NICU.
