Despite stereotypes, the career of a registered nurse isn’t always a straight line along a clinical pathway. Just ask Chris Munn, the director of emergency services for Northside Hospital Healthcare System.
Munn, who oversees the emergency departments of Northside’s three campuses (Atlanta, Forsyth and Cherokee), graduated from nursing school in 1990. He cut his teeth in the ER of a county hospital in Tennessee for about a year before becoming a traveling nurse. For the better part of four years, Munn worked in emergency departments in Texas, Louisiana, California, Washington D.C., Maryland and Georgia.
In 1995 while on assignment at Northside Hospital’s Atlanta campus, Munn says he fell in love with the facility. “The culture of Northside really appealed to me,” Munn explained. “It had a real customer-focused feel to it. After six months, I came on as a full-time staff member.”
It was then Munn’s career began segueing into management. He was soon enlisted as the night shift supervisor for the ER. A year and-a-half later, Munn became the emergency department’s operations coordinator.
In 2001, Munn shifted gears as manager of patient relations at the Atlanta campus. “It took me out of nursing,” he said, “and gave me a totally different view of that side of healthcare and the patient experience.”
Just nine months later, when Northside was about to purchase Baptist North Medical Center in Forsyth County, Munn was asked to manage its emergency department, and to help build and design the new ER once the purchase was finalized.
As the clinical leader on that project, Munn says it proved to be an incredible learning experience. After 10 years of managing the ER at Northside’s Forsyth campus, he accepted the position of director of emergency services for the entire Northside system in 2012.
“What I love about my job is I’m able to keep one foot in the clinical side and understand patient care,” he said. “I’m also on the other side with projects, growth and expansion. It’s a multi-faceted position.”
The Northside Hospital Healthcare System continues to grow with no signs of slowing. In September of last year, it was announced that Gwinnett Medical Center would be merging with Northside. While that’s still in the legal phases, Northside’s three campuses keep evolving.
Munn recently gave us a run down on the latest happenings at each:
The Atlanta campus:
“We’re seeing really high volumes of patients. In the spring of last year, we started working on an expansion project for this ER. So in October of 2015, we opened a new area, and it actually gave us an additional 15 beds of operating space in this ER. We went from a 33-bed ER to a 48-bed ER. So it was really exciting, because it was the first time that the ER at the Atlanta campus had an expansion of that nature in probably 20 years. It was a much-needed addition. That has really helped us a great deal getting patients in and getting them seen more quickly by the physicians.”
The Forsyth campus:
“This hospital has been under constant construction and expansion since we bought that facility in 2002. Back then, one of the first things we started working on was an emergency department build, because the ER at that time was very small. We built the current ER in 2004. It’s a 34-bed emergency department. We built it much larger than we needed to at the very beginning, because we anticipated such a high volume of growth up there. So we were able to grow into it over the years, but it didn’t take long. In the last couple of years, we’ve been starting to feel some growth pains in that ER. We’ve operationalized a little surge area outside of the ER to help us with volume and being able to handle patient flow. Right now we’re just starting a construction project to expand our triage area, make it a little more flexible and add some more exam space. We hope to have that finished by the end of April. It will give us some more exam space in the front of the ER and the ability to see more patients who are waiting in the waiting room in a timely manner. Our less sick patients will have the opportunity to see a provider much sooner in their stay. And it gives us more flexibility to take a larger volume of the sickest of the sick patients. So it’s going to be a welcome change for us. We’re already looking at how we can expand the emergency department at Forsyth. We have a long-range plan of what we would do next. We’re looking at that as a big picture idea for the next five years.”
The Cherokee campus:
“The big news in Cherokee is our new hospital. We’re really excited about that. At the Cherokee campus, we’ve been functioning in an older facility and have been able to expand the ER as much as we can. We actually did an expansion project there about five years ago to add more capacity. But we’ve outgrown that already, because we’re seeing a pretty swift growth of patients at the Cherokee campus. It grew about nine percent last year. That’s pretty fast for a hospital of that size. We’re very much looking forward to the new emergency department in the new hospital, which is slated to open some time in early 2017. I’ve been involved in that project since the inception of construction. So we’re trying to model the ER there based off of the things we’ve learned when we built the ER at Forsyth.”
