Haywood Regional Medical Center and county officials  are locked in a dispute over how much the hospital should pay in property taxes.

In not every town do the children of doctors and lawyers go to the same schools as the children of teachers and mill workers, but in Haywood County, that’s the case. When I was teaching full-time in the classroom, I taught students whose parents owned boats and vacation homes, and I taught students who slept in a car and ate meals at The Open Door.

The CEO of Haywood Regional Medical Center stepped down suddenly last week, effective immediately.

Within six months, a primary care medical clinic for Evergreen Packaging employees went from being on the chopping block to expanding its services.

Haywood Regional Medical Center’s recent decision to purchase the Evergreen Family Medical Center in Canton will keep Evergreen employees from losing their primary care physician and will expand health care services to the entire community. 

Since Evergreen announced in January that it would close the clinic and pharmacy at the end of March, Evergreen employees and their families have been protesting in hopes of finding a way to keep them open.

The most affluent, prominent charity in Haywood County has reinvented its mission but hopes to remain on donors’ radar as it moves toward a larger goal: improving health care in the community.

More than $6 million has been spent on upgrades and improvements at Haywood Regional Medical Center since it was bought by Duke LifePoint hospital network last year.

Pumping cash into the facility and equipment was a condition of the deal, a pledge that is par for the course in the dozens of acquisitions LifePoint has carried out.

The new CEO of Haywood Regional Medical Center assumed his role this week, pledging to lead the hospital into a new era under the ownership of Duke LifePoint.

The sale to Duke LifePoint last year ended Haywood Regional’s proud history as a community-owned, locally controlled hospital. But it was seen as a necessity to survive, with small independent hospitals fading fast everywhere without the economies of scale and expertise brought to bear by larger hospital systems.

Haywood Regional Medical Center (HRMC) announced today that Phillip L Wright has been named chief executive officer (CEO) for the hospital. He will assume his new role on Jan. 5, 2015.

Wright is a seasoned healthcare executive with 17 years of experience in executive leadership roles. He is currently serving as CEO for Santa Rosa Medical Center in Milton, Fla. Wright has also served as CEO and administrator of hospitals in South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee. 

Haywood County Commissioners have released a collection of minutes from closed sessions going back to August 2013, detailing discussions surrounding the sale of Haywood Regional Medical Center to Duke LifePoint Healthcare. 

The now-public documents deal with the bidding process, site visits to potential buyers and county commissioners’ questions surrounding the process.