Since its founding more than 100 years ago, Richmond Community Hospital has worked hard to build a reputation as a dependable provider of quality, compassionate care, treating all patients with the dignity and respect they deserve. Growing with the community through the century, the facility joined the Bon Secours ministry in 1995, ensuring its position as an anchor institution in Richmond’s East End for years to come.
It all started at the turn of the 20th century, thanks to the vision of Sarah Garland Jones, M.D., the first Black woman licensed to practice medicine in the Virginia commonwealth. After treating both Black and white patients in her own Jackson Ward clinic, Dr. Jones joined forces with a group of like-minded physicians to establish Richmond’s first Black-owned hospital in 1907.
Richmond Community Hospital operated as a full-service care provider for patients of all races, and a teaching facility for Black nurses at a time when few such options existed. Relocating to Overbrook Road in the 1930s, the hospital moved again in 1980 to its current location with personal financial investment from 21 doctors. Those doctors made significant investments of $250,000 each to build the hospital at its current location on Nine Mile Road where it remains today. In 1984, the hospital expanded key outpatient services and introduced state-of-the-art technology.
An East End native and radiology department employee since 1985, Denise Davis is proud to be part of what has become a local landmark institution.
“I’ve worked at the hospital since we used to develop X-ray films in a darkroom,” Davis says. “I love my job. You never know what a patient may be going through, so it’s important to be that smiling face they encounter each day.”
Likewise, emergency department nurse Loretta Hayes Richardson feels a genuine affinity for the work family and environment she’s found at Richmond Community Hospital.
“I love the atmosphere here. I love the people and the patients,” Richardson says. “I’m all about servant leadership. I feel like I have an opportunity to teach patients about diseases and medication, not just provide care one day and send them home. I feel like I’m making a difference in this community.”
Under Bon Secours’ management, Richmond Community Hospital has been able to expand emergency services and community outreach in meaningful ways — opening an emergency department to provide immediate access to care, distributing grants annually to local nonprofit organizations, supporting more than 40 East End entrepreneurs and small business development, and sponsoring the RVA East End Music Festival, to name just a few.
To honor the medical pioneer that she was, Bon Secours Richmond Community Hospital opened the Sarah Garland Jones Center for Healthy Living in 2017. And in its ongoing commitment to serve the community, the campus continues to grow with the introduction of a new $16.5 million East End Medical Office Building that houses a walk-in wellness clinic and a groundbreaking behavioral health partial hospitalization program. Additional campus improvements are underway, including the build-out of a $4.5 million MRI suite.
Looking to the future, hospital administrators are committed to partnering with key stakeholders across the Richmond community to evaluate their needs. This will ensure the facility is always meeting the evolving needs of patients and providing the highest level of care and services possible. Bon Secours’ comprehensive Community Today, Community Tomorrow: Pathway to Wellness in the East End Initiative offers an actionable blueprint to follow, outlining the organization’s goals through 2025.
Over the next three years, Bon Secours will increase access to medical services, focus on wellness and prevention, grow community partnerships, and recruit and train physicians and associates as part of this plan. Most notably, Bon Secours will be enhancing multispecialty outpatient access by increasing cardiology, endocrine, general surgery and oncology coverage and initiating access for pulmonary, neurology, gastroenterology and nephrology. In addition, Bon Secours plans to finalize an East End urgent care model.
To learn more about patient services, providers and other offerings at Bon Secours Richmond Community Hospital, visit bonsecours.com.
