King David

By Willy Stern

Nashville’s Baptist Hospital is a sprawling 38-acre complex of buildings, plazas, and parking garages. Like most other well-equipped modern medical centers, it has its own helipad and its own gift shop; its campus is a maze of hallways, elevators, and skywalks that connect new buildings to old buildings. Every day, the hospital’s campus swarms with visitors, patients, medical personnel, and a vast army of other employees.

Baptist describes itself as “Middle Tennessee’s largest not-for-profit medical center.” And Nashville’s other major not-for-profit hospitals can hardly dispute that claim. Here in the city, St. Thomas Hospital has 571 staffed beds, Baptist has 559, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has 553. But Baptist is not just a Nashville hospital. It also owns or co-owns hospitals in the towns of Waverly, Smithville, Centerville, and Linden. Those satellite hospitals give Baptist another 126 staffed beds and make it a virtually inescapable presence in Middle Tennessee. Its total workforce includes approximately 2,900 employees and 1,000 physicians.

But Baptist is different in other ways too. In every aspect of the hospital’s life, the very word Baptist looms large. In a recent, six-page hospital brochure, “A Report to the Community,” the word appears approximately 150 times. The mission statement of the Baptist Hospital Foundation, which supports charitable and humanitarian services in the local community, describes Baptist as a “Christian healing ministry.”

For years, however, rumors about Baptist Hospital—and its president, C. David Stringfield—have been a hot topic in Nashville’s health-care circles. No other not-for-profit local health-care institution—not VUMC, not St. Thomas—seems to attract such a fierce barrage of behind-the-scenes gossip and innuendo. To some degree, Baptist has obviously set itself up as an easy target for such talk. Using tie-ins with country music celebrities and sports stars, the hospital’s promotions have thrust it into the public eye and the public consciousness. Baptist wants to be talked about.

But much of the mumbling about Baptist relates to David Stringfield himself. To a degree unmatched at Nashville’s other not-for-profit hospitals, Stringfield’s identity is indissolubly linked with the identity of his institution. VUMC’s vice chancellor for medical affairs, Ike Robinson, and St. Thomas Hospital’s president, John Tighe, seem to have lives beyond their jobs, but Stringfield seems to live and breathe Baptist. His wife, Ruth, has frequently told her friends, “Well, you know David—he’s married to that hospital.”

Stringfield wields virtually autonomous power at Baptist, but that is not the only reason stories about him abound. He is also an odd character. Interviews with scores of individuals, including current and former Baptist Hospital executives, board members, and employees—some of them doctors, nurses, accountants, and attorneys, others of them cleaning ladies and security officers—paint a picture of a man who is easily threatened, obsessive, and ultra-competitive. By and large, members of his staff respect and fear him. They talk openly about his lack of social skills, the fact that hospital employees are expected to call him “Mr. Stringfield.”

The quirks abound: A health fanatic, he keeps a supply of fresh carrot juice on hand, and has been known to decline to shake hands for fear of picking up germs. A night owl, he sometimes goes into the office in the middle of the day and works until almost midnight. On a deeply personal level, Stringfield seems to be obsessed with matters related to health and personal hygiene. Hospital employees with first-hand knowledge of the situation say he once demanded that an Oriental rug be removed from his office because he was afraid it would collect germs. A cleaning lady assigned to his office says housekeeping personnel were told to clean the top of the door to his private bathroom every night. If Stringfield checked the door top and found dust, she says, they were severely reprimanded. Former hospital executives report that, whenever Stringfield was trapped into shaking hands with an employee, he often would return to his private washroom to scrub up.

But the story of Baptist Hospital’s David Stringfield is not just the story of a harmless eccentric. In a three-month investigation, involving more than 200 interviews, the Scene has learned that all is not well at Baptist. For four years Baptist has been the focus of an ongoing Internal Revenue Service audit that could result in the revocation of Baptist’s tax-exempt status. Documents filed in U.S. Tax Court last year say IRS officials conducting an audit at Baptist “reviewed evidence that indicated that the hospital failed to operate exclusively for charitable purposes and that portions of the hospital’s net earnings inured to the benefit of private individuals.” The same documents state that “such facts, if established, would cause the Hospital to fail to qualify for tax-exempt status.” (The documents were filed in U.S. Tax Court as part of litigation resulting from an audit of David Stringfield, not the hospital.)