Jim Coleman remembers well a piece of advice he got from the man he calls his first mentor at Erlanger Health.
“Jim Allen was director of respiratory care here,” says Coleman, who worked as an Erlanger respiratory therapist from 1980 to 1993. “He took me under his wing, and he taught me a valuable lesson – never burn bridges.
“He said, ‘Health care is a small world — you want to build relationships and keep bridges open, because you might have to go back across one of those bridges one day,'” recalls Coleman, who retraced his steps across that Erlanger bridge in 2019 and serves today as its president and CEO.
“It’s neat to think that I started my career at Erlanger, and now I’ll probably end my career at Erlanger,” he says.
Coleman has also managed to spend the vast majority of that career in the Chattanooga area, including administrative posts at Parkridge in Chattanooga, Hutchison Medical Center in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia and Skyridge Medical Center in his hometown of Cleveland, Tennessee.