Asheville vigil highlights fears over Mission Hospital decline

Former patients, healthcare workers and neighbors gathered Monday evening at First Congregational Church in Asheville for a vigil centered on Mission Hospital, where organizers said people came to describe worsening care and grieve what they see as a steady decline under HCA Healthcare. For Buncombe County families, the stakes run beyond one campus at 509 Biltmore Ave.: Mission remains the region’s flagship hospital and a key source of emergency and specialty care across western North Carolina.

HCA completed its purchase of Mission Health on February 1, 2019, paying about $1.5 billion for the six-hospital system. At the time, HCA said it would build a 120-bed inpatient behavioral health hospital in Asheville and invest $232 million in Mission Health facilities. Local advocates now say those promises have been overshadowed by worsening conditions that ripple through emergency rooms, inpatient units and specialist care.

Federal scrutiny has been severe. A 384-page report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in February 2024 documented serious staffing, management and patient-care problems at Mission Hospital, including hours-long delays in critical tests, patients waiting in hallways, overworked nurses and doctors’ orders ignored. CMS placed the hospital in immediate jeopardy again in October 2025, the third such sanction since the HCA sale, and later reporting said the hospital had faced immediate jeopardy four times since 2019 when a 2021 determination was included.

The 2025 case involved incidents cited on July 26, August 19 and September 4, 2025, deepening concern among advocates who say the hospital’s problems have become a public-safety issue for Buncombe County. In January 2026, county health officials warned that people who visited the Mission Hospital emergency department waiting room between 2 and 6:30 a.m. on January 4 might have been exposed to measles, a warning that put a wider spotlight on how local confidence in the hospital affects community health.

Reclaim Healthcare WNC, a coalition of physicians, nurses, elected officials, clergy, attorneys, business leaders and community members, has kept pressure on HCA to improve staffing and conditions. State Sen. Julie Mayfield has also publicly criticized the hospital’s safety problems. At Monday’s vigil, organizers with The Patients Union said the gathering was meant to give former patients, healthcare workers, families and residents a place to share what they have seen and demand accountability from the company now running the county’s main hospital.