Dr. Veronica Elders
Dr. Veronica Elders, the newly named CEO of Nashville General Hospital, is a nurse first, she tells the Nashville Scene. With nearly 30 years of experience in the medical field, she was appointed chief nursing officer of Nashville General — the city’s safety-net hospital — just one month before the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
Elders also stepped into the role of interim CEO during a trying time. Her predecessor Joseph Webb resigned after the hospital board voted not to renew his contract in February 2025, following an audit finding that the hospital’s leadership had approved more than $4 million in contracts without seeking board approval.
Elders’ task is to get more patients to the hospital — especially those who can pay to help offset the care for uninsured patients, a key part of the hospital’s mission and charter. She’s also working to secure a new or improved building for the hospital after plans have stalled for several years. The mayor’s office has said it will create a task force on the matter following Nashville General’s renewed professional services agreement with Meharry Medical College in September.
“Healthcare should be a right, and it’s not,” Elders tells the Scene. “It’s a commodity, and how do people choose us? We have to be worthy of the choice, but there has to be an investment into the hospital.”
Elders sat down with the Scene to discuss her vision for the hospital.
What is your long-term vision for the hospital?
Our long-term vision is to be a strategic partner in the healthcare ecosystem here in Nashville. We are the city safety-net hospital, and one of the things that’s just very concerning, I think, for hospital leaders across the ecosystem is the number of uninsured patients that we’re going to continue to have as legislation and some of these work requirements take place.
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You’re wanting to see more patients come in. How do you compete with other hospitals?
We’re not in competition with anybody. The other hospitals are full. They typically have patients that are waiting for beds, but we have capacity. So how do we partner with them in order to help alleviate some of that strain? It goes back to the lack of investment in our infrastructure, the lack of investment in our capital, because patients have to choose.
We did an assessment of what it would take to renovate this building in 2023, and it was $395 million in 2023. If you think about inflation, now it’s probably about $500 [million].
Are you planning to renovate the current space or build a new space?
We’ll be in partnership with the mayor’s office and also [Meharry Medical College president James] Hildreth to determine what that looks like. The one thing that they’ve said about renovating this building is it’s almost cheaper to do something else.
I’ve talked to Dr. Hildreth about a new facility outside of this building. … I think we are in alignment. The relationship with Meharry is really good, and we both want to see Nashville General have a future and a future in training our future physicians as well.
Is there a motto that you go by in your leadership?
We have to level up. I would use that. Just in healthcare, COVID did something to our workforce. Getting back to that deep caring about patients is truly important to me.
We need to be giving the care that we want for ourselves or we want for our family, and so as a nurse, that is my number one goal, but [we also need to] provide this workforce with an environment that’s caring — a great place to work. I keep saying that this could be a great place to work, and that’s what we’re shooting towards.
In your time as interim CEO, was there something that came up that surprised you?
The scrutiny that we encountered right off the heels of Dr. Webb. … You think you turn the page, and now it’s time for us to work on our processes, and we weren’t able to.
It was just tense, it was very stressful. In that crisis of trying to fix the financial infrastructure, fix our human resources, just the regulatory oversight — it was a lot. We are still in the state of recovering. I think if you look at all of the media that happened with Dr. Webb, we took a hit. To be a trusted healthcare provider, you don’t want to be in the news, and we were for quite some time.
The amount that Nashville General has requested from Metro has gone up over the past several years, from $43 million in 2021 to $70 million this year. What is the reason for that?
We take our projection for uncompensated care, and that’s what we request in our subsidy. It has gone up, but also supply costs have gone up, inflation has gone up, pharmaceutical prices have gone up. We have to take all of that into account. It’s never going to be stagnant. The charter says we take care of the underserved. We take care of those who don’t have insurance. That is the amount that is required to do so. And so, as bread and eggs have gone up, so has the price of healthcare.
