Governance Research

Report of Findings: Trustee Demographic Survey

In December 2007, the Center for Healthcare Governance partnered with the Health Research and Educational Trust on a survey of 249 hospital and health system CEOs about the demographic characteristics of their boards, looking at age, level of tenure, and work status of their board members.

Overall, the age distribution of the board members in the health care institutions surveyed is somewhat skewed in the direction of the older age brackets with 70% of board members being in their 50s or 60s. There were very few differences among different types of health care organizations in the average age of their board members except for the following two areas:

• Freestanding health care institutions were more likely to have a greater percentage of board members at least 60 years of age (48% of board members) than were health systems (37%) or health care institutions that are subsidiaries of health systems (36%).
• 
  Health care institutions with a religious affiliation were less likely to have board members under the age of 40 (1% of board members) than were health care institutions with no religious affiliation (8%).

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