Throughout Hurricane Helene, the slogan going around Haywood County has been, “neighbors helping neighbors.” The personification of those words is nowhere more apparent than at Haywood Pathways Center in Waynesville, where a small group of volunteers gathered on Oct. 5 to minister to some of the county’s most vulnerable residents.

Hospital staff work through communication disruptions, water system failures and their own storm-induced uncertainty to keep caring for patients. 

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its annual hospital ratings July 31, awarding top five-star ratings for quality of care to the Charles George Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Asheville/Oteen, the Margaret R. Pardee Memorial Hospital in Hendersonville, and AdventHealth Hendersonville. 

The North Carolina attorney general’s office had “great concerns about how HCA was selected” as the purchaser of the Mission Health System, including that “the deck had been stacked in its favor from the beginning” by then-CEO Ronald A. Paulus and his advisor Philip D. Green, according to a 2018 internal document obtained by Asheville Watchdog.

By Peter H. Lewis • Asheville Watchdog | Nashville-based HCA Healthcare, which operates Asheville’s Mission Hospital and five other hospitals in Western North Carolina, reported Friday that it made $2.27 billion in profits in the three-month period that ended Sept. 30, triple the amount in the same period last year. 

According to an internal email leaked to the Asheville Citizen-Times, Mission’s CEO Dr. Ron Paulus will be leaving his post for a position at HCA Healthcare, the for-profit health care corporation that just purchased Mission Health. 

Following HCA Healthcare’s purchase of the Mission Health System, the nonprofit foundations that have supported Mission’s hospitals for so long had the choice to dissolve or find a new mission. 

As all of Mission’s legacy foundations establish their new mission and board of directors, Dogwood Health Trust is in the process of looking for the right person to lead the new private charity foundation.  

With the completion of Mission Health System’s sale of assets to HCA Healthcare, Dogwood Health Trust is now officially operating as a private, nonprofit foundation with the purpose of dramatically improving the health and wellbeing of all people and communities in Western North Carolina.

Those who were unhappy with the original terms of the proposed sale of Mission Health to a for-profit heathcare giant got some relief last week.