Thanking Veterans for Service to Our Country & Company

At HCA Healthcare, we will honor our veterans and military family members who have given of themselves during both peacetime and conflict throughout November. We currently employ over 37,000 Veterans – a significant portion of our workforce – and we’d like to dedicate this month as our very own HCA Healthcare Military Appreciation Month.

In addition to our enterprise-wide Military Appreciation Month, we will also celebrate Veterans Day on November 11 – a day that has been observed each November since the first anniversary of the end of World War I, when it was known as “Armistice Day.” In fact, Veterans Day, which pays tribute to all living or deceased American veterans, did not become an official national holiday until 1938. We at HCA Healthcare have continued the tradition of recognizing our veterans on Veterans Day, and this year, throughout the month of November.

We owe an enormous debt to the countless American veterans and their families who set aside their personal ambitions and dreams to ensure the security of our great nation. As a beneficiary of those sacrifices, please take the time to thank a veteran today – I know we will, starting with HCA Healthcare veteran Betsy Flagstadt. A manager in the catheterization lab at Conroe Regional Medical Center, an affiliate of HCA Healthcare’s Gulf Coast Division, she served our country proudly and continues to serve our patients and our communities.

Thank you, Betsy, and to all of our veterans for your service!

In 2016, HCA Healthcare hired more than 3,700 veterans and nearly 1,000 military spouses.

Betsy Flagstadt’s Story of Service

After graduating high school and working at a local fast food restaurant, I decided I wanted more than what small town life offered and joined the United States Army in March 1982. I did my basic and advanced training and went on to my first duty station as a wire systems installer/operator with the U.S. Army Signal Corps (USASC).

During my time with the Signal Corps, I served in Korea, North Carolina and Honduras. I then had the opportunity to reclassify into the supply field and went for training as a materials management and accounting specialist at Fort Lee, Virginia in 1987.

After training, I traveled to Germany where I completed a three-year tour with the 501^st Support Battalion. I was the major assembly’s manager, data processing supervisor and shipping and receiving supervisor in a Class IX Repair Parts Warehouse in support of 11 tank units. Troops were being sent to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield just before I left Germany. I managed to make it home to Escanaba, Michigan for a quick visit before returning to Fort Bragg, N.C. My unit had already been deployed to Saudi Arabia and myself, with a few other “newbies,” headed that way on New Year’s Eve 1990, to participate in Operation Desert Storm. We spent four months there before the war was declared over, and then returned to Fort Bragg.

When I left the military, I was hired by the local police department and spent the next 10 years as a 911 Dispatcher. After several jobs and a move to Texas to be with my oldest sister, I was fortunate enough to get a position in the cath lab at HCA Healthcare’s Conroe Regional Medical Center.  The supply field is my passion and it is what I am good at. At HCA Healthcare, I have been able to continue to do what I love.

For more information on careers at HCA Healthcare, please visit here. 

John Steele

SVP HR