Hutcheson Medical Center
Parkside Nursing Home, a 109-bed facility next to Hutcheson Medical Center in Fort Oglethorpe, is for sale.Hutcheson Medical Center plans to sell its nursing home, Parkside at Hutcheson, as the publicly owned Fort Oglethorpe hospital looks for a new partner to manage its operations.
“I just hope if anybody buys it, it stays like it is,” Wanda Parrish said Wednesday afternoon as she walked into the 109-bed nursing home on Hutcheson’s Fort Oglethorpe campus to visit her 88-year-old mother, Verna Bean, who’s lived there about five years. “We’ve been real satisfied. They take good care of her, and it’s real clean.”
Hutcheson spokeswoman Stacey Kaufmann said the nursing home is profitable and now is 85 percent full. Hutcheson wants to sell it, she said, so it can focus on its core hospital business.
“Many hospitals are divesting of noncore businesses [such as nursing homes or property management] in order to focus on core hospital service lines and operations,” Kaufmann said via email.
She declined to say specifically who might buy the hospital or what it’s worth. The nursing home is being shopped around by Ken Conner, a principal at Decosimo Accountants and Business Advisors in Chattanooga, who’s putting together the request for proposals for Hutcheson to find a new partner as it ends its current management agreement with Erlanger Health System of Chattanooga.