The ousted president and chief executive officer at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital took a pay cut when he came to the Vineyard 13 months ago.

Joe Woodin, who had previously headed the Gifford Medical Center in Vermont, disclosed this week that his base pay on Martha’s Vineyard was $400,000, about 10 per cent less than his base pay at his previous job.

“I did take a cut in compensation when I came here,” he told the Gazette by phone. “And I was happy to do it because I wanted the job.”

Mr. Woodin was abruptly fired on June 5 by the hospital board of trustees. Former chief executive officer Timothy Walsh has returned from retirement to take the helm on an interim basis while hospital leaders begin a search for a new CEO.

There has been little explanation for the firing, although hospital board chairman Timothy Sweet emphasized last week that there had been no malfeasance. Mr. Sweet also said Mr. Woodin had put in a request for a compensation increase, which triggered a review process. He confirmed that Mr. Woodin had a five-year contract but declined to state his salary.

Private nonprofit hospitals, including the Vineyard hospital which is an affiliate of Partners Healthcare, are required to report the salaries for top executives on their U.S. tax returns (Form 990), among other financial information. The forms are public but there is an approximate two-year time lag in reporting the information. As a result, the latest publicly available information for the Vineyard hospital is for 2014.

In that year Mr. Walsh was CEO and was earning $449,036 in base pay. The other top executive at the Vineyard hospital, Dr. Pieter Pil, chief of the medical staff, earned $488,482 in base pay.

In 2014 at Gifford, Mr. Woodin was earning $443,734 in base pay and other compensation of $45,370, the Form 990 for the Vermont medical center shows.

Speaking to the Gazette by phone this week, Mr. Sweet reiterated that he could not discuss Mr. Woodin’s salary, on the advice of hospital attorneys. He also declined to say how much Mr. Walsh is being paid as an interim or how much the firing of Mr. Woodin will cost the hospital.

“The cost to the hospital will be what we feel is a generous separation package for Joe for sure . . . and the cost of a search for a new CEO,” Mr. Sweet said.

He said if all goes according to plan, Mr. Walsh will stay until the end of the year, when a new CEO will be in place. He confirmed that trustees are in the process of forming a search committee again, and said he anticipates that an executive search firm will be hired as was done with the search for Mr. Woodin, although he could not say if it would be the same firm. ”We are now questioning if we did everything well [in the recent search for Mr. Woodin] and we want to be sure to do it right,” Mr. Sweet said.

The longtime board chairman also expressed regret at recent events. Among other things, the sudden ouster of Mr. Woodin sparked an outcry in the community that continues to simmer. Some of the disaffected are mid-level hospital employees who felt Mr. Woodin had begun to transform a long-entrenched internal culture that resisted change. The employees are reluctant to speak their views openly, out of worry about keeping their jobs, the Gazette has learned.

Mr. Sweet said every attempt is being made to assuage concerns. “Mistakes may have happened in this process,” he admitted. “One of them was the use of the word vision got misconstrued,” he said. In a written public statement last week, hospital trustees attempted to explain the ouster by describing a loss of confidence and disparate visions between the CEO and the board. This week Mr. Sweet sought to clarify terms.

“The vision we spoke of was a different vision in governance and not a vision of where the hospital is going today,” he said. “I do regret the word vision got taken out of context and we did a bad job using that word.”

He concluded: “There is no difference in the vision we had and the vision Joe had — we both want to be the best hospital we can be. It was a different vision of governance .... I hope in time we can clarify more.”

Financially, the hospital remains comfortably in the black, despite a drop in operating profit for the last fiscal year, according to a summary provided by Mr. Sweet at the request of the Gazette. Information about the hospital’s finances was historically included in the hospital’s annual report, which is circulated to the public through the Island newspapers, but that practice ended after 2012.

According to the summary, total operating income for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2016 was $77.3 million, while operating expenses were $77.4 million, resulting in an operating loss of $101,250. However, the loss was more than offset by income on investment of $3.8 million, the summary shows, resulting in a bottom line excess of revenue over expenses of $3.7 million.

For the 2015 fiscal year the hospital had total operating revenue of $76.1 million and expenses of $73.7 million, ending the year with an operating gain of $2.4 million. That year the hospital lost $2,406 on investments, resulting in a bottom line excess of $2.4 million.

Mr. Sweet said the decline in operating profit for fiscal 2016 was due to the departure of Dr. Mark Scheffer, a popular orthopedic surgeon who had begun to bring business to the hospital and became ill. “That hurt the bottom line, but it has begun to come back,” he said, noting the addition of two new orthopedic surgeons.

A spokesman for Partners Healthcare this week spoke about executive compensation in general, noting that it is subject to the strictest standards in a rapidly changing industry.

“The market for senior health care executives is a national one,” said Rich Copp, senior vice president for communications at Partners. “And we must provide competitive wages and benefits in order to contract with the best individuals at a time when health care is undergoing sweeping change.”

He also said that Partners “has developed a well-defined performance-based system that allows us to offer senior executive compensation that is competitive with other academic medical centers and hospitals in Massachusetts and across the nation.”

Board members at Partners hospitals do not receive compensation, Mr. Copp said.