CITY BRED, COUNTRY ADVOCATE: HELPING A RURAL ROCKINGHAM HOSPITAL STAY AFLOAT IS JOB ONE FOR UNC HEALTH CARE EXECUTIVE DANA WESTON.

• Author: McCollum, Stephen
• Position: NC TREND: Game Changer: Profile of a female leader

Dana Weston has a big-city background, but she's now tackling one of the tougher small-town challenges in North Carolina. Since 2015, she has led UNC Rockingham Health Care in Eden, a city of about 15,000 that is 35 miles north of Greensboro. She has guided the 108-bed hospital formerly called Morehead Memorial Hospital through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017 and its sale last year to UNC Health Care. She was named Young Healthcare Executive of the Year in 2018 by the National Association of Health Service Executives and received an Alumni Leadership Award from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

"While my passion is health care, my purpose has always been to do what I can to create a world that is good, a goodness that is not tied to a ZIP code," she told 500 attendees at the annual Institute for Emerging Issues conference in Raleigh in February. Weston studied neuroscience and behavioral biology at Emory University, earned a master's of health care administration at UNC Chapel Hill and had a fellowship at Duke University Hospital. She worked for Novant Health for about eight years before taking the Eden post.

She talked about her work in an interview edited for clarity and brevity.

> TELL US ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND.

I'm a city girl, born and raised in St. Louis, went to college in Atlanta, and when I moved to North Carolina, I had an image of one huge tobacco field. I definitely didn't know what rural culture was about. I moved to the Triangle, and I thought that Durham/Chapel Hill was too small. So I moved to Charlotte.

Living now in Eden has taught me so much about the beauty of rural communities, including the unmistakable pride of the people. Generations of textile mill workers and farmers are proud of owning their homes and passing them down to their children. They are not now, nor have they ever been, looking for handouts. When they are uninsured, what they are likely doing is staying at home and trying some cure that has been passed down through the ages, and by the time they end up in our emergency room, they are sicker than they would have been had they had access to primary care.

> YOU'VE SAID THAT RURAL ECONOMIC STRUGGLES ALSO AFFECT URBAN AREAS. HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO ROCKINGHAM COUNTY?

When rural counties like Rockingham struggle economically, it creates pressure for state assistance. The North Carolina Rural Center released a study showing 80 (of 100) counties classified as rural had a 6% decrease in taxable...