BIOGRAPHY
Mr. Frank Iacobell, the oldest of the two sons of Peter Iacobell, M.D., and Josephine Acierno Iacobell, was born in Detroit on October 10, 1937. He attended high school at St. Anthony's and college at both John Carroll and Saint Bonaventure Universities. After getting his undergraduate degree in 1960, he earned a master's degree from George Washington University Graduate School in 1963.

Mr. Iacobell began his hospital administration career at Woman's (Hutzel) Hospital in 1964, following a residency year at Baltimore City Hospital and another year on a fellowship at Washington County Hospital in Hagerstown, Maryland. His position changed in 1966 from administrative assistant to assistant director. In 1970, he was the hospital's director or chief operating officer.

Mr. Iacobell re-negotiated an earlier union contract and implemented a fairer wage and salary program, provided health insurance, and instituted a tuition reimbursement plan to encourage lower grade employees to seek additional training in order to be eligible for better jobs. He also completed some major structural additions and hospital service reorganizations during this period.

He was the president of Hutzel Hospital from 1980 to 1995. Mr. Iacobell is currently semi-retired and does some consulting work in the area of health care planning and facility management

Discusses implementing job training and advancement programs for unionized, primarily minority, employees at Hutzel Hospital during the early 1960s.

You couldn't go to work in a nursing home unless you had experience as a nurse’s aide. What we would [do was] run you through a six-week program as a nurse's aide, you would work maybe another six weeks, [then] put application in to a nursing home. The minute opportunity came, you left. So we're running a training center for nursing homes…So we met with the union, even though we had a couple more years to go on our contract, and we gave them three offers—Blue Cross-Blue Shield [health insurance] we pay for because I wanted to be consistent with other hospitals; a raise of twenty-five cents increase across the board for every category in the union; and free parking. We were charging for parking, and I said, “This is nonsense,” because we had all kinds of space to park in. Well, that set up a good relationship with me and the union…When we started [re]negotiating contracts, [other issues came up]. Most of the nursing staff were R.N.’s and LPN’s. We probably had more LPN’s than R.N.’s, at the time. Yet LPN’s were primarily black and R.N.’s were primarily white and that's because the black women, for the most part, weren't accepted in [local] nursing schools back in the [19]50s and [19]60s. Realizing that they were having [recruitment] problems, we implemented and the union accepted and we gave it to all the other employees, too—tuition reimbursement…Where, if people wanted to go to school part-time, we would pay for their education while they were working so they could. Then I wanted to create ladders. And the only way you create ladders is give the opportunity to go back and get [more] educat[ion]. And I always said, given the first choice, we'd promote from within before we'd go to the outside in all instances, all categories.