BILL CROUCH

CHARLESTON – Bill Crouch, the cabinet secretary for the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources since 2017, will retire at the end of the year under a cloud of controversy and pressure from lawmakers.

Gov. Jim Justice announced Monday that Crouch will retire effective Dec. 31.

Dr. Jeffrey Coben, the associate vice president for health affairs at West Virginia University and Dean of the School of Public Health, will serve as interim secretary of DHHR.

Crouch will continue to serve Justice and DHHR in an advisory role while the search for a new permanent cabinet secretary begins.

“We should absolutely all be very thankful and appreciative of the job that he has done, because it’s all one tough, almost thankless job in lots of ways.” Justice said Monday during a virtual announcement from the State Capitol Building. “Absolutely, Bill Crouch has led us through all of this and absolutely done an amazing job and we should be thankful for the service he provided all of us.”

According to his resignation letter dated Monday, Crouch said that he has planned to stay on as DHHR secretary until the implementation of the $1 million organizational assessment and strategic plan for DHHR created by the McChrystal Group and released to the public in November. But Crouch said recent controversies aimed at his leadership of DHHR have become a distraction to the work of the agency.

“As everyone knows, the department has been under constant scrutiny over this past year,” Crouch said. “Although most of the allegations were aimed at me, it is the department that has suffered. DHHR staff have become collateral damage. And that is wrong. The staff of DHHR are the most dedicated and smartest group of people that I have ever worked with, and I thank them for their hard work and their loyalty.”

Most recently, Crouch and DHHR has come under criticism for issues with the intellectually and developmentally disabled (IDD) community and alleged abuse and neglect issues at the state’s two psychiatric hospitals. DHHR has also been criticized for severe shortages of child welfare staff, exacerbating the state’s number of children in foster care.

“We need to continue to make improvements, but the perception that everything is broken is wrong,” Crouch wrote. “We have done and continue to do amazing work for the people of West Virginia. Virtually all of our problems are workforce problems. We have staff shortages in all Bureaus and areas of DHHR, from attorneys and nurses to food service staff in our facilities.”

Crouch was appointed by Justice as DHHR cabinet secretary in 2017. He retired in 2016 from Bill J. Crouch and Associates, a health care consulting company he founded in 1987. Prior to 1987, Crouch served as executive director of the West Virginia Health Care Cost Review Authority.

“He’s been with us approaching seven years now,” Justice said. “He came out of retirement and took this position; a position that oversees roughly 6,000 employees. A position that for decades and decades and decades there had been need for improvement. Absolutely, a position that along came with it COVID and all the different ramifications of COVID.”

Coben, Crouch’s temporary successor and a former emergency room physician, first joined WVU in 2004. He has served as director of the Center for Rural Emergency Medicine, director of the Injury Control Research Center, vice chair for Research in Emergency Medicine, associate dean for Operations in the School of Medicine, and associate vice president for Clinical Innovations, Planning and Operations for WVU’s Health Sciences Center.

“My background, actually, is first and foremost as an ER physician, so I’m pretty used to uncertainty; situations where you need to act quickly,” Coben said, speaking outside the Governor’s Reception Room after the announcement. “I’ve been at WVU for 18 years and during part of that time I’ve served in interim positions as well when we had schools and programs that were going through transitions in leadership. I’m pretty comfortable in that form of setting.”

As associate vice president for Health Affairs, Coben leads the State-University Partnership, a collaboration between WVU and DHHR founded in 2017. The partnership provides guidance to DHHR’s Medicaid-based healthcare programs, and provides similar services as a for-profit consulting firm. The partnership also includes embedded staff within DHHR.

“What I’m most comfortable about is I’ve had 12 years of experiencing working with several of the bureau commissioners and other leaders within DHHR over that time,” Coben said. “I know a lot of the folks there. I think they are dedicated, hard-working people. I understand there is a lot under the auspices of DHHR that is under scrutiny and needs to be looked at. I just want to work with everyone to try to get as smooth a transition as we can working with Secretary Crouch retiring.”

Dr. Clay Marsh, the state’s COVID-19 czar, and James Hoyer, the former adjutant general of the West Virginia National Guard and leader of the state’s joint interagency task force for COVID-19 vaccines, will also serve as advisors to Justice and DHHR as it searches for a new permanent cabinet secretary and implements recommendations from the McChrystal Group report. Marsh is chancellor and executive dean for Health Sciences at WVU, while Hoyer is also a WVU senior associate vice president.

“We are here to try in every way to improve the health and wellbeing of our citizens; to provide the access to critical healthcare assets for each and every West Virginian and do our best to protect the most vulnerable in our state, whether that be for risk of COVID or that be for our children or our elders or people who don’t have the same capabilities for getting what they need as others do,” Marsh said. “We are deeply committed as a team to help the governor in every way.”

“Clay and I will do our best to try to provide the best support and advice we can to the governor to move things in the direction that we need to continue to move in as a state,” Hoyer said. “Governor, we’ll do our best to help you get to where you want us to be and where we need to be as a state.”

On top of spending the last nearly three years dealing with COVID, DHHR has fought an uphill battle with the state’s systemic poverty level, poor public health outcomes, record-breaking substance use and drug overdose deaths, large numbers of children in in-state and out-of-state foster care, and allegations of abuse and neglect at state-ran hospitals.

DHHR has come under scrutiny over the last year, with Justice vetoing a bill that would have required DHHR be split into two departments. Instead, Justice called for a top-to-bottom review of DHHR, with the McChrystal Group winning a $1 million contract to create an organizational assessment and strategic plan for DHHR.

Lawmakers have expressed dissatisfaction with the McChrystal Group report which recommended the creation of three new deputy secretary positions, integration teams to facilitate better communication, and other upper management changes. Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, released a statement Monday expressing optimism in the leadership changes at DHHR.

“There’s no question about it: DHHR is not in a good place, and it’s going to take a lot of work to make things right,” Blair said. “We believe that it’s going to take statutory changes to make some of these major overhauls, but we hope this change in leadership brings a change to its management culture. We look forward to working with Interim DHHR Secretary Dr. Jeffrey Coben as we move forward with advancing significant changes to one of our state’s most critical departments. We wish Secretary Crouch well in his retirement.”