Getting 'Up To Speed' On Progress At CMC

By NH Journal

It’s been a year since HCA acquired Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, and in this episode of Up to Speed from NHJournal, host Michael Graham gets a progress report from CMC’s CEO, John Skevington.

Skevington had an upbeat prognosis about CMC and its mission, while acknowledging there’s still work to be done.

“We are still not on solid financial footing,” Skevington told NHJournal in the wide-ranging Up To Speed interview. “However, we are going to be here.”

HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, completed its $110 million acquisition of CMC in early 2025 after a review by the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, which included a public hearing and a settlement requiring HCA to maintain the hospital’s Catholic identity and charity care mission. The deal—which also required Vatican approval—ended years of financial uncertainty for the 330-bed Manchester hospital and its west-side community.

Skevington, who has been running hospitals for 18 years, said the past year has produced at least one genuine surprise: the flood of job applicants.

“I’ve never seen this in my 18 years running hospitals,” he said. “Every single day, people continue to apply to come to work at CMC. I think it speaks to the notoriety and reputation that CMC has.”

That pipeline matters because the workforce is central to HCA’s investment plan. The company has committed more than $157 million in infrastructure upgrades to the facility, including a $46 million overhaul of the hospital’s aging energy plant—currently located underground beneath the parking lot—which will be moved above ground and fully rebuilt. Another $27 million project will replace windows in one of the hospital’s older buildings and upgrade all eight of its elevators.

“Investing in infrastructure in our hospitals is a major core part of what HCA does with its capital,” Skevington said.

The most visible change for patients may be in the emergency room. Skevington said CMC has dramatically reduced wait times since the acquisition, filling every ER position and expanding capacity from 24 to 31 beds through an ongoing renovation.

He pointed to what he called “time-sensitive diagnoses”—heart attacks, stroke, sepsis—where faster access to a provider directly improves patient outcomes.

“The faster you see a provider, the faster your care gets started, the better your outcome is,” he said.

Beyond the Manchester campus, HCA is extending CMC’s footprint through freestanding emergency rooms (FSERs). A new facility is set to open in Nashua this summer, followed by one in Concord in the summer of 2027. Those would be the fourth and fifth freestanding ERs operated by the CMC/HCA system in New Hampshire.

The Nashua facility has become a focal point of HB 1215, which aims to regulate FSERs. The debate is split between supporters of the new model and critics from existing local hospitals.

Skevington said patient satisfaction at the existing freestanding ERs has been strong, averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars. He compared the competitive dynamic to the initial skepticism that greeted urgent care centers 15 years ago.

“In reality, two things happened,” he said. “It put patients in the right location for care, and then those same hospitals that were resistant got into the urgent care business. That’s what we’re actually seeing now.”

Asked about the concerns raised last year over HCA’s willingness to allow the hospital to maintain services that define its Catholic mission, Skevington said those questions have been answered.

“Right out of the gate, there was a threat to whether or not OB and nursery services were going to continue,” he said. “We didn’t miss a single day. We were able to not only preserve those services, but we’re building out great teams to help grow them.”

As part of the Attorney General’s settlement, HCA signed a Catholic Identity Commitment Agreement requiring it to operate CMC in compliance with the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Healthcare Services. The Diocese of Manchester and the Holy See in Rome both approved the deal.

HCA has also committed more than $1 million to community partners in the first year, a figure Skevington said reflects CMC’s broader role in Manchester beyond its medical services.

“What makes Manchester really special is how the entire community—different sectors, public and private—comes together to tackle challenges,” he said. “CMC has been a big part of that, and we continue that.”

Despite the optimism, Skevington was candid that CMC’s turnaround will take time. The hospital was losing patients and revenue before the acquisition; in April 2024, it laid off 142 employees to stem losses. Skevington acknowledged the broader healthcare environment remains strained.

“Just because HCA took over the hospital a little over a year ago doesn’t mean all of those challenges went away overnight,” he said. “We are still continuing to reshape CMC, so it’s here for the next 50 years. Maybe there’s some misperception that that can happen overnight. It doesn’t.”

Statewide, he said, New Hampshire mirrors national trends: demand for healthcare services is up sharply since the pandemic, emergency rooms are overcrowded, and primary care access remains a serious gap. He pointed to a graduate medical education program HCA launched at Portsmouth Regional Hospital in 2019—training internal medicine, family practice, and psychiatry residents—as one longer-term piece of the workforce solution.

Skevington said CMC has held three public information sessions over the past year, and he’s been struck by how engaged the community has been.

“I don’t know that that same level of interest would be there in a lot of communities,” he said. “It really speaks to how important CMC is.”

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.