This reporting was made possible in part by a grant from the Fourth Estate Fund.
Demonstrators in front of the county courthouse called attention to low safety grades at the hospital, flashing signs to passing cars, many of which slowed to honk and wave.
Leapfrog, a nonprofit hospital-safety watchdog organization, gave NHRMC “C” grades in Fall 2024 and Spring 2025; the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has downgraded the hospital to just two of five stars. That’s a far cry from Novant’s promise to elevate the already well-scoring NHRMC to one of the nation’s best hospitals when it was jockeying with other healthcare companies to purchase the county-owned facility.
That promise, and Novant’s inability to fulfill it so far, inspired the name of the Five Star Project, which organized Tuesday’s demonstration.
Related: A retired doctor says he nearly died at NHRMC. Now he's pushing for reform
The organization was founded by retired doctor and former hospital administrator Dr. Jon Martell, who nearly died last year after getting routine gallbladder surgery. Martell attributed his brush with death to systemic shortcomings in Novant’s management. Having worked in hospital safety for years, he set out to try and get Novant to improve its ratings.
After protesting outside, demonstrators headed inside and, toward the end of the meeting, shared their own stories.
There was a son who lost his mother, a wife who lost her husband, and a father who lost his son — all laid the blame for these tragedies at Novant’s feet.
“Long waits, preventable mistakes, a doctor who didn't care enough to apologize, no communication, and it cost the life of the man of my world. It cost the life of my children's father,” one woman told commissioners.
“Now nurses are just widgets in the system, and if they aren't Novant team players, they are likely to find themselves unemployed,” the nurse said.
Because HIPAA, the federal patient privacy law, makes it difficult for Novant or NHRMC to comment on the stories of individual cases, it can be hard to vet out some of the stories — or to tell whether a death might have been preventable if Novant implemented some of the improvements Martell and others have suggested.
But many of the stories touched on key themes that WHQR has reported on before — poor hygiene, bad communication, and overcrowding that’s left patients in hallways.
Professionals also weighed in, including a nurse with over forty years of experience, who said Novant no longer valued nurses.
A national healthcare consultant, Linnea Wiseman, who had previously worked on quality of care at NHRMC, as well as many other hospital systems, including Johns Hopkins and Cleveland Clinic, said the hospital was falling short of its responsibilities to patients.
"So I am really ingrained in quality and providing good care for patients as a patient advocate, and with all the patients I see in my business that I have now, we're not doing that. We're not doing that at all," she said.
Novant has addressed some of these issues in the past, but has sometimes dismissed concerns based on CMS or Leapfrog ratings, saying in the spring of 2024 it was “pleased” with a B score. More recently, those scores have been taken more seriously by a new administration, including former NHRMC president Ernie Bovio, who now heads up the broader coastal market for Novant, and current president Laurie Whalin, who took over leadership of NHRMC at the beginning of 2025.
In an interview in May, Whalin told WHQR she knew the public would hold NHRMC accountable for CMS and Leapfrog scores seriously, and promised the hospital would become a five-star, A-rated hospital — although that will take time, because those rankings are based on data from past years (in some categories, up to four years).
This week, Whalin reiterated her administration’s commitment to hospital quality.
“We take every patient experience, family members' feedback, and patient feedback extremely seriously. And when we get and receive that feedback, we 100% do our due diligence on that, and engage with family members to understand, where are the opportunities, what we could have done better, where we did hit the mark, when we hit the mark, and how to make them feel 100% comfortable, confident, and have had a good experience,” Whalin said.
Asked how she would respond to family and friends who explicitly blame Novant for injuries or deaths of their loved ones, Whalin said, “I take that responsibility seriously. That’s why we’re in this business — and I 100% am fully accountable for it, for what happens, what we do here.”
Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Heather Davis added, “I think the number one most important thing to know is this team is all dedicated to the safety and quality of therapy. They come to work every day committed to providing the best care and for patients to have the absolute best outcomes. We know that sometimes that does not always happen — and so those are, those are opportunities that we want to hear, we want to learn from.”
Whalin and Davis maintain that Novant has put considerable resources into improving hospital safety and quality of care on a daily basis — and pointed to a number of awards for patient care Novant has won over the last year or two. And, while acknowledging that sometimes there will be tragic events at NHRMC, they said the hospital is better off now — for patients and staff — than it was several years ago.
Over the last year, current patients and staff have continued to share concerns with the Five Star Project, WHQR, other media outlets, and on social media. Whalin acknowledged that, however hard her team is working, the public will continue to be concerned until they see positive changes in the CMS and Leapfrog rankings — and hearing more positive conversations in the community.
Martell is not content to wait, and believes county commissioners have a legal obligation to ensure that the hospital improves — and hopes that, at the least, they’ll put more public pressure on Novant.
While some commissioners have expressed their frustrations and concerns about the situation, the county appears to have few actual legal options — and hasn’t publicly weighed in as a governing body. WHQR emailed all five commissioners and the county communications office on the Tuesday morning before and the Wednesday morning after the protest, asking if they wanted to address the demonstration or public comments; no responses were received.
Meanwhile, the Five Star Project’s board of directors is set to meet next week to decide on next steps, which could include continued protests (and picketing at the hospital), legal action, traning independent patient advocates, exploring unionization for nurses, and looking changing or repealing the Certificate of Need process — a state-based regulation system that requires healthcare systems to show a ‘need’ for new facilities and services, which some have argued prevents competition.
