Good People
5questions Story and photo by David Moore
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n the best of times it would be a challenge to take the administrative reins of a healthcare system with two hospitals, nine outpatient locations, 1,569 employees, 220 skilled physicians, 26 specialties, a $165 million budget and the pressure of maintaining the standards required to keep its Joint Commission designation as a “Top Quality Performer” among America’s hospitals. Those are the reins Cheryl Hays accepted at the end of April 2020, when Marshall Medical Center President Gary Gore retired after some 30 years of leading Marshall Medical Center North and South. She took those reins as the entire world stood at the gaping threshold of the dark unknowns of the Covid-19 pandemic. Cheryl had 31 years in nursing and hospital management – 21 of them in administration at MMCN – when board representatives began asking her in late 2019 about taking Gary’s place. Covid was unheard of; her reluctance was mostly because of Gary’s substantial shadow. “I kept saying no,” says Cheryl, who at the time had been MMCN’s administrator for 17 years. “I felt our jobs were very different. Gary was such a visionary. I felt I was the boots on the ground making things happen. It would be big shoes to fill.” In January 2020, Mike Alred, chairman of the Marshall County Healthcare Authority, came to Cheryl’s office as a show of confidence in her. “I understand why you keep saying no,” she recalls Mike saying. “But I want you to know the board would be very supportive of you doing this.” “I told him I would consider it and needed to pray about it,” she replied. She agreed about the time the first U.S. Covid case was reported, before anyone knew the coronavirus would cause the greatest 16
Cheryl Hays
Walking into the Covid pandemic as president of Marshall Medical Centers healthcare crisis ever, escalating to 242 million cases worldwide – and counting. “Gary told me the new job was just more of what I had been doing. But we didn’t recognize the Covid factor,” Cheryl says. “It’s been nothing like what we’d been doing.”
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ovid or not, while growing up in Oneonta, Cheryl never pictured herself running hospitals “As I recall,” she says, “I never really gave a lot of thought to what I would be.” The main career avenues open to women then were teaching and nursing. The former was Cheryl’s early interest. “I lined up dolls with a chalkboard and taught them,” she laughs. As a teen, her mother told her she was smart and should be a nurse. “I looked into it and decided it’d be interesting,” Cheryl says. After graduating in 1976 from Oneonta, her boyfriend opposed her going off to a four-year nursing school, so she undertook a two-year medical assistant program at UAB – and enjoyed it. That summer, Cheryl worked for a Cullman doctor. Summer’s end also saw boyfriend’s end, but Cheryl’s desire to earn a nursing degree remained. “I asked my dad if he would be willing to support that goal, and he said absolutely. So I finished at Jacksonville State with a BSN degree – and a husband.” He husband, Tim Hays, is now a retired teacher who wrote an original musical The Whole Backstage produced in 2021. Featured in GLM’s spring 2020 issue, Tim related his version of how he “reeled in” Cheryl, saying he “happened” to be sitting on the hood of his Camaro, shirtless with gold-tanned jack-hammer muscles, playing a guitar and singing “Love Me Tender,” all to impress her. After that, she was in hot pursuit.
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im did make an impression, Cheryl laughs. “But he would tell you
NOVEMBER | DECEMBER | JANUARY 2021-22
I stalked him, and there’s not a shred of truth to that.” He soon asked her out, but she had an upcoming chemistry test and declined. “He assured me that chemistry was one of his best subjects and he could help me study. I fell for it – but I soon found out that he knew no more about chemistry than I did. “However,” Cheryl continues, “he was really funny and a quick thinker, so maybe I was pretty easily reeled in – but I never pursued him. I was raised to believe that the guy always had to make the first move. You never acted interested – and yet we dated steadily. So maybe I reeled him in…” Either way, they married in January 1981. She graduated that spring, they settled in Oneonta, and she became a nurse, working nights in Birmingham at Montclair Medical Center’s postpartum GYN unit for $7.35 per hour. St. Vincent’s East later hired her for its ICU. “I loved it,” Cheryl says, “but I did not love the commute.” When her hometown hospital offered her an ICU position, she accepted. That led to a position as director of education/ infection preventionist. Cheryl later started the master’s program at UAB but was disappointed with its focus on theory and not clinical nursing, so she changed to hospital administration. “I knew immediately I was in the right spot,” she says. “It combined my interest in business with that of clinical care.”
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hough happy in her studies, swapping a salary for tuition payments, commuting and raising their toddler son Adam on Tim’s teaching pay was a squeeze. “By the time I finished my master’s, we had about $4 in the bank, a loan from my dad, some canned vegetables from Grandma, and baby Lindsey on the way,” she says. “But we made it!”
