Driving Our Economy Forward: CHI Memorial Hospital
Memorial Hospital opened in Chattanooga in 1952. Since then, the health organization has been striving to provide compassionate health care and has even received national recognition. Tonight, we are learning how the hospital is teaming up with Chattanooga State Community College to help students become future medical professionals in our community. Let’s take a look at this week’s driving our economy forward.
The CHI Memorial Health Care System has 3 campuses in Chattanooga.
Sherry Fusco, Chief Nursing Officer says, “We have 357 license beds. and we have our Hixson campus, we have 74 license beds. We have a new Georgia campus that is coming online December of 2025. We’re very excited about that will be on Battlefield Parkway. This hospital was our first to open by The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. And we opened in January of 1952. We do work with Chattanooga State. It’s a great school. We have three cohorts that we offer annually. And we offer them in February, July, and in September. So that allows any students that are graduating from their program to come into us as new nurses. And they get to spend a lot of time in our residency with other new nurses, learning before they actually go to their unit.”
Gavin Creed, RN said, “Chattanooga State I feel like does a wonderful job in their nursing program and the other hospitals as well. Just sending people to recruit was the initial um way I heard about more information about the facility. Just through clinicals getting to spend time in each facility. I kind of learned where I wanted to go and just really loved how Memorial ran things in the emergency department.”
Fusco continued, “There are a number of us that were born, born here I was one of them. So, I feel like I have come full circle. I’m actually a graduate of Chattanooga State and many years ago. And I had just a wonderful experience with all of the instructors and the entirety of the program. My uh daughter is a radiologic technologist. And she graduated from the Chattanooga State program. As, my son a registered nurse and he also went through the Chattanooga State program as well. Being at Memorial has just been one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life. I’ve been given so many opportunities and experiences. Chattanooga State really set me up for success to be able to do that and level setting expectations. But yes, truly the sky’s the limit. Uh, I did not foresee myself being a chief nursing officer. And here I am today. So, I’m very grateful for that opportunity. The instructors were amazing. You could call upon them at any point in time and they were really um you know geared to see every student that they had succeed. We’re always going to need people and we’re going to always have folks that are going to get sick. So, it’s just vital to our future that we continue to educate folks who have a passion and a dream to help others uh into the nursing field and support them every way that we can. And propel them forward I call it paying it forward.”
