Campbell Clinic holds true to founder’s vision
Small Business Spotlight in Emphasis: Health Care & Biotech for The Memphis Daily News
Sept. 14, 2013
For more than a century, Campbell Clinic has provided the care for the bones and muscles of Memphis. The clinic’s doctors and other staff also have shared their knowledge of orthopedics and how to best provide such care to the world at large.
Dr. Willis C. Campbell founded his clinic in 1909 in what would become the heart of the city’s medical district. Much of that district now is populated by the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, where Campbell helped to organize the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.
Campbell would go on to begin the first orthopedic residency program and co-found The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), serving as that organization’s first president. His understanding of orthopedics ran deep and, in his quest to share his knowledge, he wrote the first textbook on the subject, “Campbell’s Operative Orthopaedics.”
Campbell Clinic CEO George Hernandez, left, and chief of staff Dr. Frederick
M. Azar are helping guide the longtime orthopedic clinic into its next century.(Photo: Memphis News/Andrew J. Breig)
It’s but one tradition Campbell Clinic has maintained into the 21st century.
Since 1909, Campbell Clinic has grown to four locations, 50 doctors, more than 450 employees, with 40 residents and five fellows. Nearly 150,000 patients per year visit the clinic for a range of subspecialties including pediatric orthopedics, trauma, spine, total joint replacement and orthopedic oncology, among others.
“I think it actually goes back to the vision or the culture that Dr. Campbell first developed for the clinic and we have never wavered from that, nor do I ever see us wavering from that,” CEO George Hernandez said of the clinic’s growth and place within the medical landscape. “A lot of it really is, when a resident joins or is in a training program, at Campbell Clinic, he or she sees that the focus on education, the focus on research, the focus on training the next generation of orthopedic surgeons, even the focus on training the world in orthopedic surgery by virtue of our publication and our book, ‘Campbell’s Operative Orthopaedics,’ that is part and parcel to what we are.”
Through services such as physical therapy, onsite X-ray and MRI imaging and surgery, Campbell is seeing to the health needs of the baby boomers as the effects of age and wear takes its toll on joints and bones.
People are living longer and are increasingly more active, and they see the benefit of a more active lifestyle. As a result, Hernandez said, “the number of knee and hip replacements in particular are slated to, I think, quadruple or more in the next decade or so.”
Campbell Clinic has served as consultant to local orthopedic implant manufacturers such as Smith & Nephew and Wright Medical, contributing to the research and development of new designs, technology and sizes of such products. As far as nonsurgical options and opportunities to connect with new patients, the clinic encourages preventative health and being proactive before beginning a workout regimen . . . (read more)
