Catholic Health East celebrated its 10th anniversary by spotlighting its founders, honoring employees and holding a candle-lighting ceremony. The Newtown Square, Pa.-based system concurrently marked its Heritage Day.
Three Catholic health systems consolidated a decade ago to form CHE: Eastern Mercy Health System, the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany Health System and the Sisters of Providence Health System. At the Jan. 8 anniversary gathering, a panel of speakers reminisced about their experiences helping to form CHE. They described the health care landscape of the mid-to-late 1990s and the conditions that led many Catholic health care organizations to affiliate or merge to become part of larger systems.
Martha Conroy, CHE director of sponsorship education and ministry formation, described the ceremony that concluded the program: Attendees remembered "the sacred trust that our founding sponsors placed in our hands ten years ago, and ... [honored] our current sponsors with the symbolic lighting of a candle for each of them."
CHE recently published a book, Together We Are So Much More: A Living History of Catholic Health East, to mark its first decade of service.