ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — A death at Mission Hospital has made headlines in the latest controversy for the HCA Healthcare-owned medical center. A local health care coalition held a press conference today to address the incident and call for change at Mission.
Read more about the death at Mission here.
The press conference ran about an hour, beginning at 10 a.m., Friday, Feb. 28, at 200 College St.
Speakers included Riceville Volunteer Fire Department Chief Tom Kelly, N.C. State Senator Julie Mayfield, Dr. Clay Ballantine of Blue Ridge Premier Medicine, Wake Forest University law professor Mark Hall and several other members of the Reclaim HealthCare WNC coalition.
Above all else, anger was the emotion in the room. Nearly every speaker at the conference called for increases in medical staffing and criticized HCA – especially Greg Lowe, president of the N.C. division of HCA – for the way Mission Hospital is being operated.
“It’s time for Mission to step up, the executives to get their hands dirty, roll up their sleeves,” Kelly said.
Kelly spoke about the reputation of Mission in the community. It is not only the employees of the hospital that have raised the alarm. According to Kelly, it is the patients, too.
“We try to comfort our patients in the most professional way, and when they beg us to go somewhere else, we have to explain to them, this is in your best interest to go to this Level II trauma center,” Kelly said. “The only Level II trauma center in Western North Carolina. Yes, they have good doctors. Yes, they have good nurses. But they’re not allowed to do their job.”
According to Hall, there are also fewer members of the staff at Mission than there should be. Hall did an objective analysis of the data coming out of Mission in public records and shared insights with the room drawn from his 178-page report.
“Mission has become more profitable. It’s done that not so much by increasing prices, although it has increased revenues to some extent since HCA purchased, but much more so by cutting costs,” Hall said. “I came into this study with the sort of academic and intellectual curiosity: What happens when you take a state-regulated monopoly, created by the state authority when the two hospitals seriously merged, subject to state oversight, then deregulate that monopoly and then turn that monopoly over to a for-profit company?”
Hall had predicted that the increase in profits would have been a result of price gouging and perhaps a more efficient flow of supplies.
“I’m sure some of that has happened, but what is much more predominant is the cost of cutting that resulted from reduced staffing, not in the administrative suite, but from reduced staffing for patient care,” Hall explained. “Immediately following the purchase, within a year, the patient staff plummeted by 30, 40 percent for the same kind of patients, the same number of patients, what have you.”
Hall compared Mission to 11 nearby hospitals of similar size. Mission was the only one with a sharp drop in patient care staff, falling from the “sort of the upper half of the staffing levels among peers to the very bottom.”
Conditions got so bad, in fact, that unsafe staffing practices and working conditions were a cornerstone of contract negotiations with union nurses last year. A strike was narrowly avoided when the two sides reached an agreement in October 2024.
Read more about the nurse strike here.
Two Mission nurses spoke at the conference about staffing issues at the hospital.
“We have made our voices known. We have taken marches to the CNO and said to her that staffing is deplorable, these are ideas that we have to fix it, please make those changes,” said one.
“I can speak specifically for the ER that at the beginning of this year, especially after Helene, we had, yes, a ton of resources,” the other said. “We’ve almost totally gone the other direction. We are back again where we were before a year and a half, two years ago.”
Rather than executives addressing their concerns, the nurse said that nurses have been expected to identify and fix problems themselves.
The path forward for Reclaim HealthCare and HCA is not yet clear, but more conversations can be expected to take place before all is said and done.
—
UPDATE: 4:52 p.m., Monday, March 3, 2025
In an emailed statement to 828newsNOW, Nancy Lindell, director of public and media relations at Mission Hospital, addressed the press conference that was held by Reclaim HealthCare WNC on Friday, Feb. 28.
“Our commitment to providing safe, exceptional care remains steadfast, especially since we have historically high numbers of patients with respiratory and flu-like illnesses. The claims made at today’s press event regarding overall staffing levels are incorrect,” Lindell wrote. “To help us during this surge in ER volume, we have provided additional resources and support, including a significant number of contract nurses from outside the area.”
Lindell said that Mission added more than 240 people to their staff in January and held more than 36 recruitment events over the last two months in an effort to prioritize hiring and recruitment to the health center.
The February death of a Mission patient, Lindell asserted, was not due to alleged low staffing levels at Mission.
“As stated previously and despite what has been insinuated, the February ER incident referenced in this press conference was a result of hospital protocols not being followed by certain staff members and not the result of staffing levels,” Lindell wrote. “The investigation of the January incident referenced in this press conference confirmed that there were no delays that impacted the outcome.”