Last Saturday, we commemorated the opening of the Baptist Promenade at Shelby Farms Park with a special celebration just for our team members. Hundreds came and brought their families for a morning of fun, and I hope everyone had a good time.
Shelby Farms Park has 4,500 acres of green space and 10.65 miles of urban trail. The Baptist Promenade is our contribution to the park, and we made our gift in conjunction with our centennial in 2012. We thought it was important to do that because of the effect it can have on our community’s health. The promenade is a space where people can enjoy the park and exercise.
Investments like these are important because they improve our communities’ health. Increasingly in health care it is becoming just as important to keep people healthy as it is to treat them when they’re sick. That’s why we support a number of health initiatives throughout our system, and we’re placing more emphasis on population health—which is a change in focus from the individual to the population of a community. This is a tremendous challenge for us because many of the communities we serve are among the most medically underserved and unhealthiest in the country. It’s going to take much effort, in our facilities and in our communities, to overcome the health conditions that disproportionately affect Mid-Southerners. But I know we’re up for the task.
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